Cybele (/ˈsɪbɪli/; Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubileya/Kubeleya Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother";[1]LydianKuvava; Greek: ΚυβέληKybele, ΚυβήβηKybebe, ΚύβελιςKybelis) is an Anatolianmother goddess; she may have a possible precursor in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük, where statues of plump women, sometimes sitting, have been found in excavations. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies around the 6th century BC.

In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the harvest–mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuchmendicant priesthood.[2] Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.

In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.

No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult. She may have evolved from a statuary type found at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, dated to the 6th millennium BC and identified by some as a mother goddess.[3] In Phrygian art of the 8th century BC, the cult attributes of the Phrygian mother-goddess include attendant lions, a bird of prey, and a small vase for her libations or other offerings.[4]

The inscription Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya[1] at a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BC, is usually read as "Mother of the mountain", a reading supported by ancient classical sources,[1][5] and consistent with Cybele as any of several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities:[6] a goddess thus "born from stone".[7] She is ancient Phrygia's only known goddess,[8] and was probably the highest deity of the Phrygian state.

In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian (Lydian) cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. This was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, and was attributed to the legendary Broteas.[9] At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[10] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[11] This was the aniconic stone that was removed to Rome in 204 BC.

Images and iconography in funerary contexts, and the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar ("Mother"), suggest that she was a mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown": the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead.[12] Her association with hawks, lions, and the stone of the mountainous landscape of the Anatolian wilderness, seem to characterize her as mother of the land in its untrammeled natural state, with power to rule, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, and to control its potential threats to a settled, civilized life. Anatolian elites sought to harness her protective power to forms of ruler-cult; in Lydia, her cult had possible connections to the semi-legendary king Midas, as her sponsor, consort, or co-divinity.[13] As protector of cities, or city states, she was sometimes shown wearing a mural crown, representing the city walls.[14] At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life".[15]

Some Phrygian shaft monuments are thought to have been used for libations and blood offerings to Cybele, perhaps anticipating by several centuries the pit used in her taurobolium and criobolium sacrifices during the Roman imperial era.[16] Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed, and eventually subsumed, by the influences and interpretations of her foreign devotees, at first Greek and later Roman.

From around the 6th century BC, cults to the Anatolian mother-goddess were introduced from Phrygia into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia. The Greeks called her Mātēr or Mētēr ("Mother"), or from the early 5th century Kubelē; in Pindar, she is "Mistress Cybele the Mother".[17]Walter Burkert places her among the "foreign gods" of Greek religion, a complex figure combining the Minoan-Mycenaean tradition with the Phrygian cult imported directly from Asia Minor.[18] In Greece, as in Phrygia, she was a "Mistress of animals" (Potnia Therōn),[19] with her mastery of the natural world expressed by the lions that flank her, sit in her lap or draw her chariot. She was readily assimilated to the Minoan-Greek earth-mother Rhea, "Mother of the gods", whose raucous, ecstatic rites she may have acquired. As an exemplar of devoted motherhood, she was partly assimilated to the grain-goddess Demeter, whose torchlight procession recalled her search for her lost daughter, Persephone.[20]

As with other deities viewed as foreign introductions, the spread of Cybele's cult was attended by conflict and crisis. Herodotus says that when Anacharsis returned to Scythia after traveling and acquiring knowledge among the Greeks in the 6th century BC, his brother, the Scythian king, put him to death for joining the cult.[21] In Athenian tradition, the city's metroon was founded around 500 BC to placate Cybele, who had visited a plague on Athens when one of her wandering priests was killed for his attempt to introduce her cult. The account may have been a later invention to explain why a public building was dedicated to an imported deity, as the earliest source is the Hymn To The Mother Of The Gods (362 AD) by the Roman emperorJulian.[22] Her cults most often were funded privately, rather than by the polis.[23] Her "vivid and forceful character" and association with the wild set her apart from the Olympian gods.[24]

Cybele's early Greek images are small votive representations of her monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands. She stands alone within a naiskos, which represents her temple or its doorway, and is crowned with a polos, a high, cylindrical hat. A long, flowing chiton covers her shoulders and back. She is sometimes shown with lion attendants. Around the 5th century BC, Agoracritos created a fully Hellenised and influential image of Cybele that was set up in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, and a tympanon, the hand drum that was a Greek introduction to her cult and a salient feature in its later developments.[25]

For the Greeks, the tympanon was a marker of foreign cults, suitable for rites to Cybele, her close equivalent Rhea, and Dionysus; of these, only Cybele holds the tympanon herself. In Greek myth, a connection between Cybele and Dionysus may not date any earlier than the 1st century BC: in the Bibliotheca formerly attributed to Apollodorus, Cybele is said to have cured Dionysus of his madness.[26] Their cults, however shared several characteristics: the foreigner-deity arrived in a chariot, drawn by exotic big cats (Dionysus by tigers, Cybele by lions), accompanied by wild music and an ecstatic entourage of exotic foreigners and people from the lower classes. By the end of the 1st century BC, their rites In Athens, and elsewhere, were sometimes combined; Strabo notes that Rhea-Cybele's popular rites in Athens might be held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession.[27] Like Dionysus, Cybele was regarded as having a distinctly un-Hellenic temperament,[28] simultaneously embraced and "held at arm's length" by the Greeks.[29]

In contrast to her public role as a protector of cities, Cybele was also the focus of mystery cult, private rites with a chthonic aspect connected to hero cult and exclusive to those who had undergone initiation, though it is unclear who Cybele's initiates were.[30]Reliefs show her alongside young female and male attendants with torches, and vessels for purification. Literary sources describe joyous abandonment to the loud, percussive music of tympanon, castanets, clashing cymbals and flutes, and to the frenzied "Phrygian dancing", perhaps a form of circle-dancing by women, to the roar of "wise and healing music of the gods".[31]

Conflation with Rhea led to Cybele's association with various male demigods who served Rhea as attendants, or as guardians of her son, the infant Zeus, as he lay in the cave of his birth. In cult terms, they seem to have functioned as intercessors or intermediaries between goddess and mortal devotees, through dreams, waking trance or ecstatic dance and song. They include the armed Kouretes, who danced around Zeus and clashed their shields to amuse him; their supposedly Phrygian equivalents, the youthful Corybantes, who provided similarly wild and martial music, dance and song; and the dactyls and Telchines, magicians associated with metalworking.[32]

Cybele's major mythographic narratives attach to her relationship with Attis, who is described by ancient Greek and Roman sources and cults as her youthful consort, and as a Phrygian deity. In Phrygia, "Attis" was both a commonplace and priestly name, found alike in casual graffiti, the dedications of personal monuments and several of Cybele's Phrygian shrines and monuments. His divinity may therefore have begun as a Greek invention based on what was known of Cybele's Phrygian cult.[33] His earliest certain image as deity appears on a 4th-century BC Greek stele from Piraeus, near Athens. It shows him as the Hellenised stereotype of a rustic, eastern barbarian; he sits at ease, sporting the Phrygian cap and shepherd's crook of his later Greek and Roman cults. Before him stands a Phrygian goddess (identified by the inscription as Agdistis) who carries a tympanon in her left hand. With her right, she hands him a jug, as if to welcome him into her cult with a share of her own libation.[34] Later images of Attis show him as a shepherd, in similar relaxed attitudes, holding or playing the syrinx (panpipes).[35] In Demosthenes' On the Crown (330 BC), attes is "a ritual cry shouted by followers of mystic rites".[36]

Attis seems to have accompanied the diffusion of Cybele's cult through Magna Graecia; there is evidence of their joint cult at the Greek colonies of Marseilles (Gaul) and Lokroi (southern Italy) from the 6th and 7th centuries BC. After Alexander the Great's conquests, "wandering devotees of the goddess became an increasingly common presence in Greek literature and social life; depictions of Attis have been found at numerous Greek sites".[37] When shown with Cybele, he is always the younger, lesser deity, or perhaps her priestly attendant; the difference is one of relative degree, rather than essence, as priests were sacred in their own right and were closely identified with their gods. In the mid 2nd century, letters from the king of Pergamum to Cybele's shrine at Pessinos consistently address its chief priest as "Attis".[38]

Votive altar inscribed to Mater Deum, the Mother of the Gods, from southern Gaul[39]

Romans knew Cybele as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"), or as Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods"), equivalent to the Greek title Meter Theon Idaia ("Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida"). Rome officially adopted her cult during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), after dire prodigies, including a meteor shower, a failed harvest and famine, seemed to warn of Rome's imminent defeat. The Roman Senate and its religious advisers consulted the Sibylline oracle and decided that Carthage might be defeated if Rome imported the Magna Mater ("Great Mother") of Phrygian Pessinos.[40] As this cult object belonged to a Roman ally, the Kingdom of Pergamum, the Roman Senate sent ambassadors to seek the king's consent; en route, a consultation with the Greek oracle at Delphi confirmed that the goddess should be brought to Rome.[41] The goddess arrived in Rome in the form of Pessinos' black meteoric stone. Roman legend connects this voyage, or its end, to the matron Claudia Quinta, who was accused of inchastity but proved her innocence with a miraculous feat on behalf of the goddess. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, supposedly the "best man" in Rome, was chosen to meet the goddess at Ostia; and Rome's most virtuous matrons (including Claudia Quinta) conducted her to the temple of Victoria, to await the completion of her temple on the Palatine Hill. Pessinos' stone was later used as the face of the goddess' statue.[42] In due course, the famine ended and Hannibal was defeated.

Most modern scholarship agrees that Cybele's consort (Attis) and her eunuch Phrygian priests (Galli) would have arrived with the goddess, along with at least some of the wild, ecstatic features of her Greek and Phrygian cults. The histories of her arrival deal with the piety, purity and status of the Romans involved, the success of their religious stratagem, and power of the goddess herself; she has no consort or priesthood, and seems fully Romanised from the first.[43] Some modern scholars assume that Attis must have followed much later; or that the Galli, described in later sources as shockingly effeminate and flamboyantly "unRoman", must have been an unexpected consequence of bringing the goddess in blind obedience to the Sibyl; a case of "biting off more than one can chew".[44] Others note that Rome was well versed in the adoption (or sometimes, the "calling forth", or seizure) of foreign deities,[45] and the diplomats who negotiated Cybele's move to Rome would have been well-educated, and well-informed.[46] Romans believed that Cybele, considered a Phrygian outsider even within her Greek cults, was the mother-goddess of ancient Troy (Ilium). Some of Rome's leading patrician families claimed Trojan ancestry; so the "return" of the Mother of all Gods to her once-exiled people would have been particularly welcome, even if her spouse and priesthood were not; its accomplishment would have reflected well on the principals involved and, in turn, on their descendants.[47] The upper classes who sponsored the Magna Mater's festivals delegated their organisation to the plebeian aediles, and honoured her and each other with lavish, private festival banquets from which her Galli would have been conspicuously absent.[48] The goddess herself was contained within her Palatine precinct, along with her priesthood, at the geographical heart of Rome's most ancient religious traditions.[49] She was promoted as patrician property; a Roman matron – albeit a strange one, "with a stone for a face" – who acted for the clear benefit of the Roman state.[50][51]

Augustan ideology identified Magna Mater with Imperial order and Rome's religious authority throughout the empire. Augustus claimed a Trojan ancestry through his adoption by Julius Caesar and the divine favour of Venus; in the iconography of Imperial cult, the empress Livia was Magna Mater's earthly equivalent, Rome's protector and symbolic "Great Mother"; the goddess is portrayed with Livia's face on cameos[52] and statuary.[53] By this time, Rome had absorbed the goddess's Greek and Phrygian homelands, and the Roman version of Cybele as Imperial Rome's protector was introduced there.[54]

Imperial Magna Mater protected the empire's cities and agriculture — Ovid "stresses the barrenness of the earth before the Mother's arrival.[55] Virgil's Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 BC) embellishes her "Trojan" features; she is Berecyntian Cybele, mother of Jupiter himself, and protector of the Trojan prince Aeneas in his flight from the destruction of Troy. She gives the Trojans her sacred tree for shipbuilding, and begs Jupiter to make the ships indestructible. These ships become the means of escape for Aeneas and his men, guided towards Italy and a destiny as ancestors of the Roman people by Venus Genetrix. Once arrived in Italy, these ships have served their purpose and are transformed into sea nymphs.[56]

Stories of Magna Mater's arrival were used to promote the fame of its principals, and thus their descendants. Claudia Quinta's role as Rome's castissima femina (purest or most virtuous woman) became "increasingly glorified and fantastic"; she was shown in the costume of a Vestal Virgin, and Augustan ideology represented her as the ideal of virtuous Roman womanhood. The emperor Claudius claimed her among his ancestors.[57] Claudius promoted Attis to the Roman pantheon and placed his cult under the supervision of the quindecimviri (one of Rome's priestly colleges).[58]

Illustration of the month of April based on the Calendar of Filocalus (354 AD), perhaps either a Gallus or a theatrical performer for the Megalesia[59]

The Megalesia festival to Magna Mater commenced on April 4, the anniversary of her arrival in Rome. The festival structure is unclear, but it included ludi scaenici (plays and other entertainments based on religious themes), probably performed on the deeply stepped approach to her temple; some of the plays were commissioned from well-known playwrights. On April 10, her image was taken in public procession to the Circus Maximus, and chariot races were held there in her honour; a statue of Magna Mater was permanently sited on the racetrack's dividing barrier, showing the goddess seated on a lion's back.[60]

Roman bystanders seem to have perceived Megalesia as either characteristically "Greek";[61] or Phrygian. At the cusp of Rome's transition to Empire, the Greek Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes this procession as wild Phrygian "mummery" and "fabulous clap-trap", in contrast to the Megalesian sacrifices and games, carried out in what he admires as a dignified "traditional Roman" manner; Dionysius also applauds the wisdom of Roman religious law, which forbids the participation of any Roman citizen in the procession, and in the goddess's mysteries;[62] Slaves are forbidden to witness any of this.[63] In the late republican era, Lucretius vividly describes the procession's armed "war dancers" in their three-plumed helmets, clashing their shields together, bronze on bronze,[64] "delighted by blood"; yellow-robed, long-haired, perfumed Galli waving their knives, wild music of thrumming tympanons and shrill flutes. Along the route, rose petals are scattered, and clouds of incense arise.[65] The goddess's image, wearing the Mural Crown and seated within a sculpted, lion-drawn chariot, is carried high on a bier.[66] The Roman display of Cybele's Megalesia procession as an exotic, privileged public pageant offers signal contrast to what is known of the private, socially inclusive Phrygian-Greek mysteries on which it was based.[67]

The Principate brought the development of an extended festival or "holy week"[68] for Cybele and Attis in March (Latin Martius), from the Ides to nearly the end of the month. Citizens and freedmen were allowed limited forms of participation in rites pertaining to Attis, through their membership of two colleges, each dedicated to a specific task; the Cannophores ("reed bearers") and the "Dendrophores ("tree bearers").[69]

March 15 (Ides): Canna intrat ("The Reed enters"), marking the birth of Attis and his exposure in the reeds along the Phrygian river Sangarius,[70] where he was discovered—depending on the version—by either shepherds or Cybele herself.[71] The reed was gathered and carried by the cannophores.[72]

March 22: Arbor intrat ("The Tree enters"), commemorating the death of Attis under a pine tree. The dendrophores ("tree bearers") cut down a tree,[73] suspended from it an image of Attis,[74] and carried it to the temple with lamentations. The day was formalized as part of the official Roman calendar under Claudius.[75] A three-day period of mourning followed.[76]

March 23: on the Tubilustrium, an archaic holiday to Mars, the tree was laid to rest at the temple of the Magna Mater, with the traditional beating of the shields by Mars' priests the Salii and the lustration of the trumpets perhaps assimilated to the noisy music of the Corybantes.[77]

March 24: Sanguem or Dies Sanguinis ("Day of Blood"), a frenzy of mourning when the devotees whipped themselves to sprinkle the altars and effigy of Attis with their own blood; some performed the self-castrations of the Galli. The "sacred night" followed, with Attis placed in his ritual tomb.[78]

March 27: Lavatio ("Washing"), noted by Ovid and probably an innovation under Augustus,[83] when Cybele's sacred stone was taken in procession from the Palatine temple to the Porta Capena and down the Appian Way to the stream called Almo, a tributary of the Tiber. There the stone and sacred iron implements were bathed "in the Phrygian manner" by a red-robed priest. The quindecimviri attended. The return trip was made by torchlight, with much rejoicing. The ceremony alluded to, but did not reenact, Cybele's original reception in the city, and seems not to have involved Attis.[84]

March 28: Initium Caiani, sometimes interpreted as initiations into the mysteries of the Magna Mater and Attis at the Gaianum, near the Phrygianum sanctuary at the Vatican Hill.[85]

Scholars are divided as to whether the entire series was more or less put into place under Claudius,[86] or whether the festival grew over time.[87] The Phrygian character of the cult would have appealed to the Julio-Claudians as an expression of their claim to Trojan ancestry.[88] It may be that Claudius established observances mourning the death of Attis, before he had acquired his full significance as a resurrected god of rebirth, expressed by rejoicing at the later Canna intrat and by the Hilaria.[89] The full sequence at any rate is thought to have been official in the time of Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161), but among extant fasti appears only in the Calendar of Philocalus (354 AD).[90]

Significant anniversaries, stations and participants in the goddess' 204 arrival – including her ship, which would have been thought a sacred object – may have been marked from the beginning by minor, local or private rites and festivals at Ostia, Rome, and Victoria's temple. Cults to Claudia Quinta are likely, particularly in the Imperial era.[91] Rome seems to have introduced evergreen cones (pine or fir) to Cybele's iconography, based at least partly on Rome's "Trojan ancestor" myth, in which the goddess gave Aeneas her sacred tree for shipbuilding. The evergreen cones probably symbolised Attis' death and rebirth.[92] Despite the archaeological evidence of early cult to Attis at Cybele's Palatine precinct, no surviving Roman literary or epigraphic source mentions him until Catullus, whose poem 63 places him squarely within Magna Mater's mythology, as the hapless leader and prototype of her Galli.[93]

Eroded inscription from Lugdunum (modern Lyon, in France) commemorating a taurobolium for the Mother of the Gods under the title Augusta[94]

Rome's strictures against castration and citizen participation in Magna Mater's cult limited both the number and kind of her initiates. From the 160's AD, citizens who sought initiation to her mysteries could offer either of two forms of bloody animal sacrifice – and sometimes both – as lawful substitutes for self-castration. The Taurobolium sacrificed a bull, the most potent and costly victim in Roman religion; the Criobolium used a lesser victim, usually a ram.[95][96] A late, melodramatic and antagonistic account by the Christian apologist Prudentius has a priest stand in a pit beneath a slatted wooden floor; his assistants or junior priests dispatch a bull, using a sacred spear. The priest emerges from the pit, drenched with the bull's blood, to the applause of the gathered spectators. This description of a Taurobolium as blood-bath is, if accurate, an exception to usual Roman sacrificial practice;[97] it may have been no more than a bull sacrifice in which the blood was carefully collected and offered to the deity, along with its organs of generation, the testicles.[98]

The Taurobolium and Criobolium are not tied to any particular date or festival, but probably draw on the same theological principles as the life, death and rebirth cycle of the March "holy week". The celebrant personally and symbolically took the place of Attis, and like him was cleansed, renewed or, in emerging from the pit or tomb, "reborn".[99] These regenerative effects were thought to fade over time, but they could be renewed by further sacrifice. Some dedications transfer the regenerative power of the sacrifice to non-participants, including emperors, the Imperial family and the Roman state; some mark a dies natalis (birthday or anniversary) for the participant or recipient. Dedicants and participants could be male or female.[100]

The sheer expense of the Taurobolium ensured that its initiates were from Rome's highest class, and even the lesser offering of a Criobolium would have been beyond the means of the poor. Among the Roman masses, there is evidence of private devotion to Attis, but virtually none for initiations to Magna Mater's cult.[101] In the religious revivalism of the later Imperial era, Magna Mater's notable initiates included the deeply religious, wealthy and erudite praetorian prefectPraetextatus; the quindecimvirVolusianus, who was twice consul; and possibly the Emperor Julian.[102] Taurobolium dedications to Magna Mater tend to be more common in the Empire's western provinces than elsewhere, attested by inscriptions in (among others) Rome and Ostia in Italy, Lugdunum in Gaul, and Carthage, in Africa.[103]

"Attis" may have been a name or title of Cybele's priests or priest-kings in ancient Phrygia.[104] Most myths of the deified Attis present him as founder of Cybele's Galli priesthood but in Servius' account, written during the Roman Imperial era, Attis castrates a king to escape his unwanted sexual attentions, and is castrated in turn by the dying king. Cybele's priests find Attis at the base of a pine tree; he dies and they bury him, emasculate themselves in his memory, and celebrate him in their rites to the goddess. This account might attempt to explain the nature, origin and structure of Pessinus' theocracy.[105] A Hellenistic poet refers to Cybele's priests in the feminine, as Gallai.[106] The Roman poet Catullus refers to Attis in the masculine until his emasculation, and in the feminine thereafter.[107] Various Roman sources refer to the Galli as a middle or third gender (medium genus or tertium sexus).[108] The Galli's voluntary emasculation in service of the goddess was thought to give them powers of prophecy.[109]

Pessinus, site of the temple whence the Magna Mater was brought to Rome, was a theocracy whose leading Galli may have been appointed via some form of adoption, to ensure "dynastic" succession. The highest ranking Gallus was known as "Attis", and his junior as "Battakes".[110] The Galli of Pessinus were politically influential; in 189 BC, they predicted or prayed for Roman victory in Rome's imminent war against the Galatians. The following year, perhaps in response to this gesture of goodwill, the Roman senate formally recognised Illium as the ancestral home of the Roman people, granting it extra territory and tax immunity.[111] In 103, a Battakes traveled to Rome and addressed its senate, either for the redress of impieties committed at his shrine, or to predict yet another Roman military success. He would have cut a remarkable figure, with "colourful attire and headdress, like a crown, with regal associations unwelcome to the Romans". Yet the senate supported him; and when a plebeian tribune who had violently opposed his right to address the senate died of a fever (or, in the alternative scenario, when the prophesied Roman victory came) Magna Mater's power seemed proven.[112]

In Rome, the Galli and their cult fell under the supreme authority of the pontifices, who were usually drawn from Rome's highest ranking, wealthiest citizens.[113] The Galli themselves, though imported to serve the day-to-day workings of their goddess's cult on Rome's behalf, represented an inversion of Roman priestly traditions in which senior priests were citizens, expected to raise families, and personally responsible for the running costs of their temples, assistants, cults and festivals. As eunuchs, incapable of reproduction, the Galli were forbidden Roman citizenship and rights of inheritance; like their eastern counterparts, they were technically mendicants whose living depended on the pious generosity of others. For a few days of the year, during the Megalesia, Cybele's laws allowed them to leave their quarters, located within the goddess' temple complex, and roam the streets to beg for money. They were outsiders, marked out as Galli by their regalia, and their notoriously effeminate dress and demeanour, but as priests of a state cult, they were sacred and inviolate. From the start, they were objects of Roman fascination, scorn and religious awe.[114] No Roman, not even a slave, could castrate himself "in honour of the Goddess" without penalty; in 101 BC, a slave who had done so was exiled.[115] Augustus selected priests from among his own freedmen to supervise Magna Mater's cult, and brought it under Imperial control.[116]Claudius introduced the senior priestly office of Archigallus, who was not a eunuch and held full Roman citizenship.[117]

The religiously lawful circumstances for a Gallus's self-castration remain unclear; some may have performed the operation on the Dies Sanguinis ("Day of Blood") in Cybele and Attis' March festival. Pliny describes the procedure as relatively safe, but it is not known at what stage in their career the Galli performed it, or exactly what was removed,[118] or even if all Galli performed it. Some Galli devoted themselves to their goddess for most of their lives, maintained relationships with relatives and partners throughout, and eventually retired from service.[119] Galli remained a presence in Roman cities well into the Empire's Christian era. Some decades after Christianity became the sole Imperial religion, St Augustine saw Galli "parading though the squares and streets of Carthage, with oiled hair and powdered faces, languid limbs and feminine gait, demanding even from the tradespeople the means of continuing to live in disgrace".[120]

Magna Mater's temple stood high on the slope of the Palatine, overlooking the valley of the Circus Maximus and facing the temple of Ceres on the slopes of the Aventine. It was accessible via a long upward flight of steps from a flattened area or proscenium below, where the goddess's festival games and plays were staged. At the top of the steps was a statue of the enthroned goddess, wearing a mural crown and attended by lions. Her altar stood at the base of the steps, at the proscenium's edge. The first temple was damaged by fire in 111 BC, and was repaired or rebuilt. It burnt down in the early Imperial era, and was restored by Augustus; it burned down again soon after, and Augustus rebuilt it in more sumptuous style; the Ara Pietatis relief shows its pediment.[121] The goddess is represented by her empty throne and crown, flanked by two figures of Attis reclining on tympanons; and by two lions who eat from bowls, as if tamed by her unseen presence. The scene probably represents a sellisternium, a form of banquet usually reserved for goddesses, in accordance with "Greek rite" as practiced in Rome.[122] This feast was probably held within the building, with attendance reserved for the aristocratic sponsors of the goddesses rites; the flesh of her sacrificial animal provided their meat.

From at least 139 AD, Rome's port at Ostia, the site of the goddess's arrival, had a fully developed sanctuary to Magna Mater and Attis, served by a local Archigallus and college of dendrophores (the ritual tree-bearers of "Holy Week").[123]

Ground preparations for the building of St Peters' basilica on the Vatican Hill uncovered a shrine, known as the Phrygianum, with some 24 dedications to Magna Mater and Attis.[124] Many are now lost, but most that survive were dedicated by high-status Romans after a taurobolium sacrifice to Magna Mater. None of these dedicants were priests of the Magna Mater or Attis, and several held priesthoods of one or more different cults.[125]

Near Setif (Mauretania), the dendrophores and the faithful (religiosi) restored their temple of Cybele and Attis after a disastrous fire in 288 AD. Lavish new fittings paid for by the private group included the silver statue of Cybele and her processional chariot; the latter received a new canopy with tassels in the form of fir cones.[126] Cybele drew ire from Christians throughout the Empire; when St. Theodore of Amasea was granted time to recant his beliefs, he spent it by burning a temple of Cybele instead.[127]

Cybele's major myths deal with her own origins, and her relationship with Attis. The most complex, vividly detailed and lurid accounts of this myth were produced as anti-pagan polemic in the late 4th century, by the Christian apologist Arnobius.[128]

For Lucretius, Magna Mater "symbolised the world order". Her image held aloft signifies the Earth, which "hangs in the air". She is the mother of all, and the yoked lions that draw her chariot show the offspring's duty of obedience to the parent.[129] She herself is uncreated, and thus essentially separate from and independent of her creations.[130]

In the early Imperial era, the Roman poet Manilius inserts Cybele as the thirteenth deity of an otherwise symmetrical, classic Greco-Roman zodiac, in which each of twelve zodiacal houses (represented by particular constellations) is ruled by one of twelve deities, known in Greece as the Twelve Olympians and in Rome as the Di Consentes. Manilius has Cybele and Jupiter as co-rulers of Leo (the Lion), in astrological opposition to Juno, who rules Aquarius.[131] Modern scholarship remarks that as Cybele's Leo rises above the horizon, Taurus (the Bull) sets; the lion thus dominates the bull. Some of the possible Greek models for Cybele's Megalensia festival include representations of lions attacking and dominating bulls. The festival date coincided, more or less, with events of the Roman agricultural calendar (around April 12) when farmers were advised to dig their vineyards, break up the soil, sow millet "and – curiously apposite, given the nature of the Mother's priests – castrate cattle and other animals."[132]

^With reference to Cybele's origins and precursors, S.A. Takács describes "A terracotta statuette of a seated (mother) goddess giving birth with each hand on the head of a leopard or panther," Cybele, Attis and related cults: essays in memory of M.J. Vermaseren 1996:376; of this iconic type Walter Burkert says "The iconography found leads directly to the image of Kybele sitting upon her throne between two lions" (Burkert, Homo Necans (1983:79).

^Roller 1999, pp. 67–68. This displaces the root meaning of "Cybele" as "she of the hair": see C.H.E. Haspels, The Highlands of Phrygia, 1971, I 293 no 13, noted in Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, 1985, III.3.4, notes 17 and 18.

^Pausanias, Description of Greece: "the Magnesians, who live to the north of Spil Mount, have on the rock Coddinus the most ancient of all the images of the Mother of the gods. The Magnesians say that it was made by Broteas the son of Tantalus." The image was probably Hittite in origin; see Roller, 1999, p. 200.

^Roller believes that the name "Attis" was originally associated with the Phrygian Royal family and inherited by a Phrygian priesthood or theocracy devoted to the Mother Goddess, consistent with Attis' mythology as deified servant or priest of his goddess. Greek cults and Greek art associate this "Phrygian" costume with several non-Greek, "oriental" peoples, including their erstwhile foes, the Persians and Trojans. In some Greek states, Attis was met with outright hostility; but his vaguely "Trojan" associations would have been counted in his favour for the eventual promotion of his Roman cult. See Roller, 1994, pp. 248 – 56. See also Roscoe, 1996, pp. 198 – 9, and Johnstone, in Lane, 1996, pp. 106 -7.

^Both names are inscribed on the stele. Roller offers Agdistis as Phrygian Kybele's personal name. See Roller, 1994, pp. 248 – 56. For discussion and critique on this and other complex narrative, cultic and mythological links between Cybele, Agdistis and Attis, see Lancellotti, Maria Grazia, Brill, 2002 Attis, between myth and history: king, priest, and God, Brill, 2002.

^The syrinx was a simple rustic instrument, associated with Pan, Greek god of shepherds, flocks, wild and wooded places, and unbridled sexuality. See Johnston, in Lane (Editor), 1996, pp. 107 – 111, and Roller, pp. 177 – 180: Pan is a "natural companion" for Cybele, and there is evidence of their joint cults.

^Beard, p.168, following Livy 29, 10 – 14 for Pessinos (ancient Galatia) as the shrine from which she was brought. Varro's Lingua Latina, 6.15 has Pergamum. Ovid Fasti 4.180–372 has it brought directly from Mt Ida. For discussion of problems attendant on such precise claims of origin, see Tacaks, in Lane, pp. 370 – 373.

^Several major Greek deities were adopted by Rome at about this time, including the Greek gods Aesclepius and Apollo. A version of Demeter's Thesmophoria was incorporated within the Roman cults to Ceres at around the same; Greek priestesses were brought to run the cult "for the benefit of the Roman state".

^cf the Roman response in 186 BC to the popular, unofficial, ecstatic Bacchanalia cults (originating as festivals to Dionysus, similar in form to Cybele's Greek cults), suppressed with great ferocity by the Roman state, very soon after the official introduction of Cybele's cult.

^C. C. Vermeule, "Greek and Roman Portraits in North American Collections Open to the Public," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108 (1964): 106, 126, fig. 18.

^In Greece and Phrygia, most cults to the goddess were popular, and privately funded; her former, ancient role as goddess of the former Phrygian State was as defunct as the state itself. See Roller, 1999, p. 317.

^Roller, 1999, p.280, citing Ovid, Fasti, 4. 299; cf "Phrygian Mater and Greek Meter, for whom fertility was rarely an issue, and whose association with wild and unstructured mountain landscape was directly at odds with agriculture and the settled countryside".

^Michele Renee Salzman, On Roman Time: The Codex Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83–91, rejecting the scholarly tradition that the image represents an old man in an unknown rite for Venus

^It was probably copied from a Greek original; the same appears on the Pergamon Altar. See Roller, 1999, p. 315.

^In the late Republican era, Cicero describes the hymns and ritual characteristics of Megalensia as Greek. See Takacs, in Lane (ed), p. 373.

^Dionysius_of_Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, trans. Cary, Loeb, 1935, 2, 19, 3 – 5. See also commentary in Roller, 1999, p.293 and note 39: "... one can see how a Phrygian [priest] in an elaborately embroidered robe might have clashed noticeably with the plain, largely monochromatic Roman tunic and toga"; cf Augustus's "efforts to stress the white toga as the proper dress for Romans."

^Salzman, On Roman Time, pp. 165, 167. Lawrence Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 180, suggests that Initium Caiani might instead refer to the "entry of Gaius" (Caligula) into Rome on March 28, 37 AD, when he was acclaimed as princeps. The Gaianum was a track used by Caligula for chariot exercises. Salzman (p. 169) sees the Gaianum as a site alternative to the Phrygianum, access to which would have been obstructed in the 4th century by the construction of St. Peter's.

^Forsythe, Time in Roman Religion, p. 88, noting Jérôme Carcopino as the chief proponent of this view.

^See Duthoy, p. 1 ff. Possible Greek precursors for the taurobolium are attested around 150 BC in Asia Minor, including Pergamum, and at Illium (the traditional site of ancient Troy), which some Romans assumed as their own and Cybele's "native" city. The form of taurobolium presented by later Roman sources probably developed over time, and was not unique to Magna Mater – one was given at Puteoli in 134 AD to honour Venus Caelestia (C.I.L. X.1596) – but anti-pagan polemic represents it as hers. Some scholarship defines the Criobolium as a rite of Attis; but some dedication slabs show the bull's garlanded head (Taurobolium) with a ram's (Criobolium), and no mention of Attis.

^See also Vecihi Özkay, "The Shaft Monuments and the 'Taurobolium' among the Phrygians", Anatolian Studies, Vol. 47, (1997), pp. 89–103, British Institute at Ankara, for speculation that some Phrygian shaft monuments anticipate the Taurobolium pit.

^Prudentius is the sole original source for this version of a Taurobolium. Beard, p. 172, referring to it; "[this is] quite contrary to the practice of traditional civic sacrifice in Rome, in which the blood was carefully collected and the officiant never sullied." Duthoy, p. 1 ff, believes that in early versions of these sacrifices, the animal's blood may have simply have been collected in a vessel; and that this was elaborated into what Prudentius more-or-less accurately describes. Cameron, p. 163, outright rejects Prudentius' testimony as anti-pagan hearsay, sheer fabrication, and polemical embroidery of an ordinary bull-sacrifice.

^Roscoe, 1996, p.203, citing Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 11.261; 35.165, and noting that "Procedures called "castration" in ancient times encompassed everything from vasectomy to complete removal of penis and testicles.

^Roscoe, 1996, p.203, and note 34, citing as example the thanksgiving dedication to the Mother Goddess by a Gallus from Cyzicus (in Anatolia), in gratitude for her intervention on behalf of the soldier Marcus Stlaticus, his partner "(oulppiou, a term also applied to a husband or wife)."

^Summers, in Lane, 339 -340, 342; Lucretius claims the authority of "the old Greek poets" but describes the Roman version of Cybele's procession; to most of his Roman readers, his interpretations would have seemed familiar ground.

Beard, Mary, The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the 'Great Mother' in Imperial Rome, in Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Shamanism, History, and the State (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1994) pp. 164–90.

Knauer, Elfried R. (2006). "The Queen Mother of the West: A Study of the Influence of Western Prototypes on the Iconography of the Taoist Deity." In: Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Ed. Victor H. Mair. University of Hawai'i Press. Pp. 62–115. ISBN978-0-8248-2884-4; ISBN0-8248-2884-4 (An article showing the probable derivation of the Daoist goddess, Xi Wangmu, from Kybele/Cybele)

1.
Lion
–
The lion is one of the big cats in the genus Panthera and a member of the family Felidae. The commonly used term African lion collectively denotes the several subspecies in Africa, with some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger. Wild lions currently exist in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, in ancient historic times, their range was in most of Africa, including North Africa, and across Eurasia from Greece and southeastern Europe to India. Lion populations are untenable outside designated reserves and national parks, although the cause of the decline is not fully understood, habitat loss and conflicts with humans are the greatest causes of concern. Within Africa, the West African lion population is particularly endangered, in the wild, males seldom live longer than 10 to 14 years, as injuries sustained from continual fighting with rival males greatly reduce their longevity. In captivity they can more than 20 years. They typically inhabit savanna and grassland, although they may take to bush, Lions are unusually social compared to other cats. A pride of lions consists of related females and offspring and a number of adult males. Groups of female lions typically hunt together, preying mostly on large ungulates, Lions are apex and keystone predators, although they are also expert scavengers obtaining over 50 percent of their food by scavenging as opportunity allows. While lions do not typically hunt humans, some have, sleeping mainly during the day, lions are active primarily at night, although sometimes at twilight. Highly distinctive, the lion is easily recognised by its mane. It has been depicted in sculptures, in paintings, on national flags. Lions have been kept in menageries since the time of the Roman Empire, Zoos are cooperating worldwide in breeding programs for the endangered Asiatic subspecies. The lions name, similar in many Romance languages, is derived from the Latin leo, the Hebrew word לָבִיא may also be related. It was one of the originally described by Linnaeus, who gave it the name Felis leo, in his eighteenth-century work. The lions closest relatives are the species of the genus Panthera, the tiger, the snow leopard, the jaguar. P. leo evolved in Africa between 1 million and 800,000 years ago, before spreading throughout the Holarctic region and it appeared in the fossil record in Europe for the first time 700,000 years ago with the subspecies Panthera leo fossilis at Isernia in Italy. From this lion derived the later cave lion, which appeared about 300,000 years ago, Lions died out in northern Eurasia at the end of the last glaciation, about 10,000 years ago, this may have been secondary to the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna

2.
Cornucopia
–
In classical antiquity, the cornucopia or horn of plenty was a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers or nuts. Mythology offers multiple explanations of the origin of the cornucopia, one of the best-known involves the birth and nurturance of the infant Zeus, who had to be hidden from his devouring father Kronus. In a cave on Mount Ida on the island of Crete, baby Zeus was cared for and protected by a number of attendants, including the goat Amalthea. In another myth, the cornucopia was created when Heracles wrestled with the river god Achelous and wrenched off one of his horns and this version is represented in the Achelous and Hercules mural painting by the American Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton. In modern depictions, the cornucopia is typically a hollow, horn-shaped wicker basket filled with various kinds of festive fruit, in most of North America, the cornucopia has come to be associated with Thanksgiving and the harvest. Cornucopia is also the name of the annual November Food and Wine celebration in Whistler, British Columbia, two cornucopias are seen in the flag and state seal of Idaho. The Great Seal of North Carolina depicts Liberty standing and Plenty holding a cornucopia, the coat of arms of Colombia, Panama, Peru and Venezuela, and the Coat of Arms of the State of Victoria, Australia, also feature the cornucopia, symbolising prosperity. In the book and film series The Hunger Games, the Cornucopia is filled with weapons, and is the point of the Games. The horn of plenty is used for art and at Halloween, as it is a symbol of fertility, fortune

3.
Mural crown
–
A mural crown is a crown or headpiece representing city walls or towers. In classical antiquity, it was an emblem of tutelary deities who watched over a city, later the mural crown developed into a symbol of European heraldry, mostly for cities and towns, and in the 19th and 20th centuries was used in some republican heraldry. In Hellenistic culture, a mural crown identified tutelary deities such as the goddess Tyche, the high cylindrical polos of Cybele too could be rendered as a mural crown in Hellenistic times, specifically designating the mother goddess as patron of a city. The mural crown became an ancient Roman military decoration, the Roman mural crown was made of gold, and decorated with turrets, as is the heraldic version. As it was among the highest order of military decorations, it was not awarded to a claimant until after a strict investigation. The rostrata mural crown, composed of the indicative of captured ships, was assigned as naval prize to the first in a boarding party. The Graeco-Roman goddess Romas attributes on Greek coinage usually include her mural crown, in recent times, mural crowns were used, rather than royal crowns, for medieval and modern Italian communes. A mural-crowned lady, Italia Turrita, personifies Italy, in Italy, communes and some provinces and military corps have a mural crown on their coat of arms, gold with five towers for cities, and silver with nine-towered for others. The coat of arms of the Second Spanish Republic had a mural crown, the Romanian municipal coats of arms contain a mural crown, with one or three towers for villages and communes, five and seven towers for towns and municipalities. Camp crown Naval crown Grass crown Civic crown Civic heraldry Emblem of Italy Laurel wreath Italia Turrita National personification The Stella d’Italia Mural Crown

4.
J. Paul Getty Museum
–
The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in California housed on two campuses, the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The Getty Center is in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and is the location of the museum. The collection features Western art from the Middle Ages to the present and its estimated 1.3 million visitors annually make it one of the most visited museums in the United States. The museums second location, the Getty Villa, is in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and displays art from ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. In 1974, J. Paul Getty opened a museum in a re-creation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum on his property in Pacific Palisades, in 1982, the museum became the richest in the world when it inherited US$1.2 billion. In 1997, the moved to its current location in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Detailed information about the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collections is provided on GettyGuide, at the GettyGuide stations in the Museum, visitors can get information about exhibitions, interact with a timeline, watch videos on art-making techniques, and more. Also available at the Museum, the GettyGuide multimedia player features commentary from curators and conservators on many works of art, with GettyGuide on the Web, one may browse the Museum’s collection and bookmark works of art to create a customized tour and printable map. In 1984, Frel was demoted, and in 1986, he resigned, the Getty is involved in a controversy regarding proper title to some of the artwork in its collection. The museums previous curator of antiquities, Marion True, was indicted in Italy in 2005 on criminal charges relating to trafficking in stolen antiquities, similar charges have been addressed by the Greek authorities. The primary evidence in the case came from the 1995 raid of a Geneva, Switzerland, in 2005 True was forced to tender her resignation by the Board of Trustees, which announced her early retirement. Italy allowed the statute of limitations of the charges filed against her to expire in October 2010, True is currently under investigation by Greek authorities over the acquisition of a 2, 500-year-old funerary wreath. The wreath, along with a 6th-century BC statue of a woman, have returned to Greece and are exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The Getty Museum resisted the requests of the Italian government for two decades, only to admit later that there might be problems attached to the acquisition. In 2006, Italian senior cultural official Giuseppe Proietti said, The negotiations havent made a step forward. Only after he suggested the Italian government to take cultural sanctions against the Getty, suspending all cultural cooperation, in another unrelated case in 1999, the Getty Museum had to hand over three antiquities to Italy after determining they were stolen. A Summary Catalogue of European Decorative Arts in the J. Paul Getty Museum was published in 2001, indeed, some discrete works are provided with annotations, e. g. In 2016, the head of the Greek god Hades was returned to Sicily

5.
Phrygian language
–
The Phrygian language /ˈfrɪdʒiən/ was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity. Phrygian is considered by linguists to have been closely related to Greek. The similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek ones was observed by Plato in his Cratylus, however, Eric P. Hamp suggests that Phrygian was related to Italo-Celtic in a hypothetical Northwest Indo-European group. Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one dated to between about the 8th and the 4th century BCE, and then after a period of centuries from between the 1st and 3rd centuries of the Common Era. The Paleo-Phrygian corpus is further divided into inscriptions of Midas, Gordion, Central, Bithynia, Pteria, Tyana, Daskyleion, Bayindir, the Mysian inscriptions seem to be in a separate dialect. The last mentions of the date to the 5th century CE. Paleo-Phrygian used a Phoenician-derived script, while Neo-Phrygian used the Greek script. Its structure, what can be recovered from it, was typically Indo-European, with nouns declined for case, gender and number, while the verbs are conjugated for tense, voice, mood, person, no single word is attested in all its inflectional forms. Phrygian seems to exhibit an augment, like Greek, Indo-Iranian and Armenian, c. f. eberet, probably corresponding to PIE *e-bher-e-t, to, which is not a past tense form, shows that -et may be from the PIE primary ending *-eti. This hypothesis has been rejected by Lejeune and Brixhe. e, voicing of PIE aspirates and devoicing of PIE voiced stops. The affricates ts and dz developed from velars before front vowels, Phrygian is attested fragmentarily, known only from a comparatively small corpus of inscriptions. A few hundred Phrygian words are attested, however, the meaning, a famous Phrygian word is bekos, meaning bread. According to Herodotus Pharaoh Psammetichus I wanted to determine the oldest nation, for this purpose, he ordered two children to be reared by a shepherd, forbidding him to let them hear a single word, and charging him to report the childrens first utterance. After two years, the shepherd reported that on entering their chamber, the children came up to him, extending their hands, calling bekos. Upon enquiry, the discovered that this was the Phrygian word for wheat bread. The word bekos is also attested several times in Palaeo-Phrygian inscriptions on funerary stelae and it may be cognate to the English bake. Hittite, Luwian, Galatian and Greek all influenced Phrygian vocabulary, according to Clement of Alexandria, the Phrygian word bedu meaning water appeared in Orphic ritual. The Greek theonym Zeus appears in Phrygian with the stem Ti-, perhaps with the general meaning god, the shift of *d to t in Phrygian and the loss of *w before o appears to be regular

6.
Greek language
–
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population

7.
Anatolia
–
Anatolia, in geography known as Asia Minor, Asian Turkey, Anatolian peninsula, or Anatolian plateau, is the westernmost protrusion of Asia, which makes up the majority of modern-day Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Sea of Marmara forms a connection between the Black and Aegean Seas through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and separates Anatolia from Thrace on the European mainland. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Black Sea to the Armenian Highlands, thus, traditionally Anatolia is the territory that comprises approximately the western two-thirds of the Asian part of Turkey. The Turkification of Anatolia began under the Seljuk Empire in the late 11th century, however, various non-Turkic languages continue to be spoken by minorities in Anatolia today, including Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian, Arabic, Laz, Georgian, and Greek. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line running from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Black Sea. This traditional geographical definition is used, for example, in the latest edition of Merriam-Websters Geographical Dictionary, under this definition, Anatolia is bounded to the east by the Armenian Highlands, and the Euphrates before that river bends to the southeast to enter Mesopotamia. To the southeast, it is bounded by the ranges that separate it from the Orontes valley in Syria, the first name the Greeks used for the Anatolian peninsula was Ἀσία, presumably after the name of the Assuwa league in western Anatolia. As the name of Asia came to be extended to areas east of the Mediterranean. The name Anatolia derives from the Greek ἀνατολή meaning “the East” or more literally “sunrise”, the precise reference of this term has varied over time, perhaps originally referring to the Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian colonies on the west coast of Asia Minor. In the Byzantine Empire, the Anatolic Theme was a theme covering the western, the modern Turkish form of Anatolia is Anadolu, which again derives from the Greek name Aνατολή. The Russian male name Anatoly and the French Anatole share the same linguistic origin, in English the name of Turkey for ancient Anatolia first appeared c. It is derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia, which was used by the Europeans to define the Seljuk controlled parts of Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert. Human habitation in Anatolia dates back to the Paleolithic, neolithic Anatolia has been proposed as the homeland of the Indo-European language family, although linguists tend to favour a later origin in the steppes north of the Black Sea. However, it is clear that the Anatolian languages, the oldest branch of Indo-European, have spoken in Anatolia since at least the 19th century BC. The earliest historical records of Anatolia stem from the southeast of the region and are from the Mesopotamian-based Akkadian Empire during the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 24th century BC, scholars generally believe the earliest indigenous populations of Anatolia were the Hattians and Hurrians. The region was famous for exporting raw materials, and areas of Hattian-, one of the numerous cuneiform records dated circa 20th century BC, found in Anatolia at the Assyrian colony of Kanesh, uses an advanced system of trading computations and credit lines. They were speakers of an Indo-European language, the Hittite language, originating from Nesa, they conquered Hattusa in the 18th century BC, imposing themselves over Hattian- and Hurrian-speaking populations. According to the most widely accepted Kurgan theory on the Proto-Indo-European homeland, however, the Hittites adopted the cuneiform script, invented in Mesopotamia

8.
Mother goddess
–
A mother goddess is a goddess who represents, or is a personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the world, such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother. Many different goddesses have represented motherhood in one way or another, others have represented the fertility of the earth. Several small, voluptuous figures have been found during excavations of the Upper Paleolithic. This sculpture is estimated to have been carved 35,000 years ago, some archaeologists believe they were intended to represent goddesses, while others believe that they could have served some other purpose. The Paleolithic period extends from 2.5 million years ago to the introduction of agriculture around 10,000 BCE, archaeological evidence indicates that humans migrated to the Western Hemisphere before the end of the Paleolithic, so cultures around the world share its characteristics. It is the prehistoric era distinguished by the development of stone tools, regional differences in the development of this stage of tool development are quite varied. During this time, native cultures appear in the Western Hemisphere, regular seasonal occupation or permanent settlements begin to be seen in excavations. Herding and keeping of cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs is evidenced along with the presence of dogs, almost without exception, images of what Marija Gimbutas interpreted as mother goddesses have been discovered in all of these cultures. Numerous female figurines from Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Anatolia have been interpreted as evidence of a mother-goddess cult, james Mellaart, who led excavation at the site in the 1960s, suggests that the figures represent a Great goddess, who headed the pantheon of an essentially matriarchal culture. A seated female figure, flanked by what Mellaart describes as lionesses, was found in a grain-bin, she may have intended to protect the harvest and grain. The seated or enthroned goddess-like figure flanked by lionesses, has suggested as a prototype Cybele. They also left behind many ceramic remains of pottery and clay figurines, some of these figurines appear to represent the mother goddess. Malta has some of the oldest buildings in the world, and has many fertility figures or pieces of fertility figures throughout the temples, the most famous is the Sleeping Lady, recovered from the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni, and held in the National Museum of Archaeology, Malta. Similarly, mother goddess figurines are found in the contemporaneous Ozieri culture of Sardinia. James Frazer and others advance the idea that worship in ancient Europe. According to Gimbutas Kurgan Hypothesis, Old European cultures were disrupted by expansion of Indo-European speakers from modern-day Ukraine, in 1968 the archaeologist Peter Ucko proposed that the many images found in graves and archaeological sites of Neolithic cultures were toys. The graves he was describing dated from Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete, Mother goddesses are present in the earliest images discovered among the archaeological finds in Ancient Egypt

9.
Phrygia
–
In antiquity, Phrygia was a kingdom in the west central part of Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, centered on the Sakarya River. This later Midas was, however, also the last independent king of Phrygia before Cimmerians sacked the Phrygian capital, Gordium, Phrygia then became subject to Lydia, and then successively to Persia, Alexander and his Hellenistic successors, Pergamon, Rome and Byzantium. Phrygians gradually became assimilated into other cultures by the medieval era, after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia. Phrygia describes an area on the end of the high Anatolian plateau. The climate is harsh with hot summers and cold winters, olives will not easily grow here and the land is used for livestock grazing. South of Dorylaeum, there is another important Phrygian settlement, Midas City, situated in an area of hills, to the south again, central Phrygia includes the cities of Afyonkarahisar with its marble quarries at nearby Docimium, and the town of Synnada. At the western end of Phrygia stood the towns of Aizanoi, from here to the southwest lies the hilly area of Phrygia that contrasts to the bare plains of the regions heartland. Southwestern Phrygia is watered by the Maeander and its tributary the Lycus, one of the so-called Homeric Hymns describes the Phrygian language as not mutually intelligible with that of Troy. According to ancient tradition among Greek historians, the Phrygians anciently migrated to Anatolia from the Balkans, Herodotus says that the Phrygians were called Bryges when they lived in Europe. Some classical writers also connected the Phrygians with the Mygdones, the name of two groups of people, one of which lived in northern Macedonia and another in Mysia. The classical historian Strabo groups Phrygians, Mygdones, Mysians, Bebryces, Phrygian continued to be spoken until the 6th century AD, though its distinctive alphabet was lost earlier than those of most Anatolian cultures. The so-called Handmade Knobbed Ware found in Western Anatolia during this period has been identified as an import connected to this invasion. These scholars seek instead to trace the Phrygians origins among the nations of western Anatolia who were subject to the Hittites. Some scholars dismiss the claim of a Phrygian migration as a mere legend, no one has conclusively identified which of the many subjects of the Hittites might have represented early Phrygians. Josephus called Togarmah the Thrugrammeans, who, as the Greeks resolved, were named Phrygians, however, the Greek source cited by Josephus is unknown, and it is unclear if there was any basis for the identification other than name similarity. Scholars of the Hittites believe Tegarama was in eastern Anatolia - some locate it at Gurun - far to the east of Phrygia, some scholars have identified Phrygia with the Assuwa league, and noted that the Iliad mentions a Phrygian named Asios. Another possible early name of Phrygia could be Hapalla, the name of the easternmost province that emerged from the splintering of the Bronze Age western Anatolian empire Arzawa, however, scholars are unsure if Hapalla corresponds to Phrygia or to Pisidia, further south. Herodotus also claims that Phrygian colonists founded the Armenian nation, however, little is known about these eastern Mygdones, and no evidence of Phrygian language in that region has been found

10.
Magna Graecia
–
The settlers who began arriving in the 8th century BC brought with them their Hellenic civilization, which was to leave a lasting imprint in Italy, such as in the culture of ancient Rome. Most notably the Roman poet Ovid referred to the south of Italy as Magna Graecia in his poem Fasti, according to Strabo, Magna Graecias colonization started already at the time of the Trojan War and lasted for several centuries. Also during that period, Greek colonies were established in places as widely separated as the eastern coast of the Black Sea, Eastern Libya and they included settlements in Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula. The Romans called the area of Sicily and the foot of Italy Magna Graecia since it was so densely inhabited by the Greeks, the ancient geographers differed on whether the term included Sicily or merely Apulia and Calabria, Strabo being the most prominent advocate of the wider definitions. With colonization, Greek culture was exported to Italy, in its dialects of the Ancient Greek language, its religious rites, an original Hellenic civilization soon developed, later interacting with the native Italic civilisations. Many of the new Hellenic cities became very rich and powerful, like Neapolis, Syracuse, Acragas Paestum, other cities in Magna Graecia included Tarentum, Epizephyrian Locri, Rhegium, Croton, Thurii, Elea, Nola, Ancona, Syessa, Bari and others. Following the Pyrrhic War in the 3rd century BC, Magna Graecia was absorbed into the Roman Republic, a remarkable example of the influence is the Griko-speaking minority that still exists today in the Italian regions of Calabria and Apulia. Griko is the name of a language combining ancient Doric, Byzantine Greek, there is a rich oral tradition and Griko folklore, limited now but once numerous, to around 30,000 people, most of them having become absorbed into the surrounding Italian element. Some scholars, such as Gerhard Rohlfs, argue that the origins of Griko may ultimately be traced to the colonies of Magna Graecia, one example is the Griko people, some of whom still maintain their Greek language and customs. For example, Greeks re-entered the region in the 16th and 17th century in reaction to the conquest of the Peloponnese by the Ottoman Empire, especially after the end of the Siege of Coron, large numbers of Greeks took refuge in the areas of Calabria, Salento and Sicily. Greeks from Coroni, the so-called Coronians, were nobles, who brought with them substantial movable property and they were granted special privileges and tax exemptions. Other Greeks who moved to Italy came from the Mani Peninsula of the Peloponnese, the Maniots were known for their proud military traditions and for their bloody vendettas, many of which still continue today. Another group of Maniot Greeks moved to Corsica, Ancient Greek dialects Greeks in Italy Italiotes Graia Graïke Graecus Griko people Griko language Hellenic civilization Names of the Greeks Cerchiai L. Jannelli L. Longo F. The Greek Cities of Magna Graecia and Sicily, in Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. 21 June,2005,17,19 GMT18,19 UK, salentinian Peninsula, Greece and Greater Greece. Traditional Griko song performed by Ghetonia, traditional Griko song performed by amateur local group. Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Southern Italy, the Greeks in the West, genetic signatures of the Hellenic colonisation in southern Italy and Sicily

11.
Gaia (mythology)
–
In Greek mythology, Gaia, also spelled Gaea, is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the mother of all life, the primal Mother Earth goddess. She is the parent of Uranus, from whose sexual union she bore the Titans and the Giants. Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon was Terra, the Greek word γαῖα is a collateral form of γῆ meaning Earth, a word of uncertain origin. R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin, in Mycenean Greek Ma-ka also contains the root ga-. Gaia is the personification of the Earth and these are her offspring as related in various myths, some are related consistently, some are mentioned only in minor variants of myths, and others are related in variants that are considered to reflect a confusion of the subject or association. *Some said that those marked with a * were born from Uranus blood when Cronus castrated him, hesiods Theogony tells how, after Chaos, wide-bosomed Gaia arose to be the everlasting seat of the immortals who possess Olympus above, and the depths of Tartarus below. He then tells that Gaia brought forth her equal Uranus to cover her on every side, Gaia also bore the hills, and Pontus, without sweet union of love. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, as each of the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires were born, Uranus hid them in a secret place within Gaia, causing her great pain. She created a grey flint sickle, and Cronus used the sickle to castrate his father Uranus as he approached Gaia to have sex with her. From Uranus spilled blood, Gaia produced the Erinyes, the Giants, from the testicles of Uranus in the sea came forth Aphrodite. By her son Pontus, Gaia bore the sea-deities Nereus, Thaumas, Phorcys, Ceto, and Eurybia. Because Cronus had learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overthrown by one of his children, but when Rhea was pregnant with her youngest child, Zeus, she sought help from Gaia and Uranus. When Zeus was born, Rhea gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes in his place, which Cronus swallowed, with the help of Gaias advice, Zeus defeated the Titans. But afterwards, Gaia, in union with Tartarus, bore the youngest of her sons Typhon, according to Hyginus, Earth, along with Heaven and Sea were the children of Aether and Day. According to Apollodorus, Gaia and Tartarus were the parents of Echidna, Zeus hid Elara, one of his lovers, from Hera by stowing her under the earth. His son by Elara, the giant Tityos, is sometimes said to be a son of Gaia. Gaia is believed by some sources to be the deity behind the Oracle at Delphi

12.
Minoan civilization
–
The Minoan civilization was an Aegean Bronze Age civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean islands which flourished from about 2600 to 1100 BC. It preceded the Mycenaean civilization of Ancient Greece, the civilization was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of British archaeologist Arthur Evans. It has been described as the earliest of its kind in Europe, the term Minoan, which refers to the mythical King Minos, originally described the pottery of the period. Minos was associated in Greek mythology with the labyrinth and the Minotaur, according to Homer, Crete once had 90 cities. The Minoan period saw trade between Crete and Aegean and Mediterranean settlements, particularly the Near East, traders and artists, the Minoan cultural influence reached beyond Crete to the Cyclades, Egypts Old Kingdom, copper-bearing Cyprus, Canaan and the Levantine coast, and Anatolia. Some of its best art is preserved in the city of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, although the Minoan language and writing systems remain undecipherable and are subjects of academic dispute, they apparently conveyed a language entirely different from the later Greek. The reason for the end of the Minoan period is unclear, theories include Mycenaean invasions from mainland Greece, the term Minoan refers to the mythical King Minos of Knossos. Its origin is debated, but it is attributed to archeologist Arthur Evans. Minos was associated in Greek mythology with the labyrinth, which Evans identified with the site at Knossos. However, Karl Hoeck had already used the title Das Minoische Kreta in 1825 for volume two of his Kreta, this appears to be the first known use of the word Minoan to mean ancient Cretan, Evans said that applied it, not invented it. Hoeck, with no idea that the archaeological Crete had existed, had in mind the Crete of mythology, although Evans 1931 claim that the term was unminted before he used it was called a brazen suggestion by Karadimas and Momigliano, he coined its archaeological meaning. Instead of dating the Minoan period, archaeologists use two systems of relative chronology, the first, created by Evans and modified by later archaeologists, is based on pottery styles and imported Egyptian artifacts. Evans system divides the Minoan period into three eras, early, middle and late. These eras are subdivided—for example, Early Minoan I, II and III, another dating system, proposed by Greek archaeologist Nicolas Platon, is based on the development of architectural complexes known as palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia and Kato Zakros. Platon divides the Minoan period into pre-, proto-, neo-, the relationship between the systems in the table includes approximate calendar dates from Warren and Hankey. The Thera eruption occurred during a phase of the LM IA period. Efforts to establish the volcanic eruptions date have been controversial, the eruption is identified as a natural event catastrophic for the culture, leading to its rapid collapse. Although stone-tool evidence exists that hominins may have reached Crete as early as 130,000 years ago, evidence for the first anatomically-modern human presence dates to 10, the oldest evidence of modern human habitation on Crete are pre-ceramic Neolithic farming-community remains which date to about 7000 BC

13.
Rhea (mythology)
–
Rhea is the Titaness daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, in Greek mythology and sister and wife to Cronus. In early traditions, she is known as the mother of gods and therefore is associated with Gaia and Cybele. The classical Greeks saw her as the mother of the Olympian gods and goddesses, the Romans identified her with Magna Mater, and the Goddess Ops. Alternatively, the name Rhea may be connected with words for the pomegranate, ῥόα, the name Rhea may ultimately derive from a pre-Greek or Minoan source. Cronus sired six children by Rhea, Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera, and Zeus in that order. Apart from Zeus, he swallowed all as soon as they were born, because he had learned from Gaia and Uranus that, as he had overthrown his own father, he was destined to be overcome by his own child. When Zeus was about to be born, however, Rhea sought Uranus and Gaia to devise a plan to him, so that Cronus would get his retribution for his acts against Uranus. Rhea gave birth to Zeus in Crete, and saved him by handing Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, Rhea hid Zeus in a cave on Mount Ida in Crete. Her attendants, the warrior-like Curetes and Dactyls, acted as a bodyguard for the infant Zeus, Rhea had no strong local cult or identifiable activity under her control. She was originally worshiped in the island of Crete, identified in mythology as the site of Zeuss infancy and her cults employed rhythmic, raucous chants and dances, accompanied by the tympanon, to provoke a religious ecstasy. Her priests impersonated her mythical attendants, the Curetes and Dactyls, with a clashing of bronze shields, in Roman religion, her counterpart Cybele was Magna Mater deorum Idaea, who was brought to Rome and was identified in Roman mythology as an ancestral Trojan deity. On a functional level, Rhea was thought equivalent to Roman Ops or Opis, the one at Mycenae is most characteristic, with a lioness placed on either side of a pillar that symbolizes the goddess. In Homer, Rhea is the mother of the gods, although not a mother like Cybele. In the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, the fusion of Rhea, for her temenos they wrought an image of the goddess, a xoanon, from a vine-stump. They leapt and danced in their armour, For this reason the Phrygians still worship Rhea with tambourines, the name of the bird species rhea is derived from the goddess name Rhea. The second largest moon of the planet Saturn is named after her, gantz, Timothy, Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Johns Hopkins University Press,1996, Two volumes, ISBN 978-0-8018-5360-9, ISBN 978-0-8018-5362-3. Hesiod, Theogony, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, harvard University Press, London, William Heinemann Ltd.1914. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library, Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A. T

14.
Demeter
–
In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest and agriculture, who presided over grains and the fertility of the earth. Her cult titles include Sito, she of the Grain, as the giver of food or grain, though Demeter is often described simply as the goddess of the harvest, she presided also over the sacred law, and the cycle of life and death. She and her daughter Persephone were the figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries that predated the Olympian pantheon. In the Linear B Mycenean Greek tablets of c, 1400–1200 BC found at Pylos, the two mistresses and the king may be related with Demeter, Persephone and Poseidon. It is possible that Demeter appears in Linear A as da-ma-te on three documents, all three dedicated in religious situations and all three bearing just the name. It is unlikely that Demeter appears as da-ma-te in a Linear B inscription, on the other hand,

15.
Athens
–
Athens is the capital and largest city of Greece. In modern times, Athens is a cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime. In 2015, Athens was ranked the worlds 29th richest city by purchasing power, Athens is recognised as a global city because of its location and its importance in shipping, finance, commerce, media, entertainment, arts, international trade, culture, education and tourism. It is one of the biggest economic centres in southeastern Europe, with a financial sector. The municipality of Athens had a population of 664,046 within its limits. The urban area of Athens extends beyond its administrative city limits. According to Eurostat in 2011, the Functional urban areas of Athens was the 9th most populous FUA in the European Union, Athens is also the southernmost capital on the European mainland. The city also retains Roman and Byzantine monuments, as well as a number of Ottoman monuments. Athens is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery, Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it welcomed home the 2004 Summer Olympics. In Ancient Greek, the name of the city was Ἀθῆναι a plural, in earlier Greek, such as Homeric Greek, the name had been current in the singular form though, as Ἀθήνη. It was possibly rendered in the later on, like those of Θῆβαι and Μυκῆναι. During the medieval period the name of the city was rendered once again in the singular as Ἀθήνα, an etiological myth explaining how Athens has acquired its name was well known among ancient Athenians and even became the theme of the sculpture on the West pediment of the Parthenon. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, and the god of the seas, Poseidon had many disagreements, in an attempt to compel the people, Poseidon created a salt water spring by striking the ground with his trident, symbolizing naval power. However, when Athena created the tree, symbolizing peace and prosperity. Different etymologies, now rejected, were proposed during the 19th century. Christian Lobeck proposed as the root of the name the word ἄθος or ἄνθος meaning flower, ludwig von Döderlein proposed the stem of the verb θάω, stem θη- to denote Athens as having fertile soil. In classical literature, the city was referred to as the City of the Violet Crown, first documented in Pindars ἰοστέφανοι Ἀθᾶναι. In medieval texts, variant names include Setines, Satine, and Astines, today the caption η πρωτεύουσα, the capital, has become somewhat common

16.
Eunuch
–
The term eunuch generally refers to a man who has been castrated, typically early enough in his life for this change to have major hormonal consequences. In some ancient texts, eunuch may also refer to a man who is not castrated but who is impotent, celibate, or otherwise not inclined to marry, in Latin, the words eunuchus, spado, and castratus were used to denote eunuchs. Castration was typically carried out on the soon-to-be eunuch without his consent in order that he perform a specific social function. The earliest records for intentional castration to produce eunuchs are from the Sumerian city of Lagash in the 21st century BC. Eunuchs would usually be servants or slaves who had been castrated in order to make them reliable servants of a court where physical access to the ruler could wield great influence. Similar instances are reflected in the origins and etymology of many high offices. Because their condition usually lowered their status, they could also be easily replaced or killed without repercussion. In cultures that had both harems and eunuchs, eunuchs were sometimes used as servants or seraglio guards. Eunuch comes from the Greek word eunoukhos, first attested in a fragment of Hipponax, the acerbic poet describes a certain lover of fine food having consumed his estate dining lavishly and at leisure every day on tuna and garlic-honey cheese paté like a Lampsacene eunoukhos. For instance, Lucian suggests two methods to determine whether someone is a eunuch, physical inspection of the body, or scrutiny of his ability to perform sexually with females, the earliest surviving etymology of the word is from late antiquity. The 12th century Etymologicum Magnum essentially repeats the entry from Orion, in the late 12th century, Eustathius of Thessalonica offered an original derivation of the word from eunis + okheuein, deprived of mating. The early 17th century scholar and theologian Gerardus Vossius therefore explains that the originally designated an office. He says the word came to be applied to castrated men in general because such men were the usual holders of that office. Still, Vossius notes the alternate etymologies offered by Eustathius and others, modern etymologists have followed Orions first option. As an alpha-declension noun, eunē features the stem-vowel -a-, all words that are formed by adding onto eunē have an a-sound or long e-sound in the combined syllable, as in eunater or eunēter, eunaios or eunēthen. By analogy, a compound between eunē and ekhein would be expected to come out as eunēkhos, or in English eunech, on the other hand, the etymology offered by Eustathius would work only if eunis contributes an e-sound or o-sound to the compound. Unfortunately, there are no known compounds of eunis to use for comparison, consequently, the rules of Greek vowel contraction at any rate favor the derivation from eunoos and ekhein. And in fact, other words that have the same ending -oukhos feature a stem-vowel o in the first word of the compound, be that as it may, virtually all modern reference works cite the derivation from eunē and ekhein

17.
Mendicant
–
A mendicant is one who practices mendicancy and relies chiefly or exclusively on charitable donations to survive. It is a form of asceticism, many religious orders adhere to a mendicant way of life, including the Catholic mendicant orders, Hindu ascetics, some dervishes of Sufi Islam, and the monastic orders of Jainism and Buddhism. In the Catholic Church, followers of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic became known as mendicants, the Way of a Pilgrim depicts the life of an Eastern Christian mendicant. Media related to Mendicant monks at Wikimedia Commons Dictionary definition from the Free Dictionary

18.
Attis
–
Attis /ˈætɪs/ was the consort of Cybele in Phrygian and Greek mythology. His priests were eunuchs, the Galli, as explained by origin myths pertaining to Attis and castration. Attis was also a Phrygian god of vegetation, and in his self-mutilation, death, and resurrection he represents the fruits of the earth, the 19th-century identification with the name Atys encountered in Herodotus as the historical name of the son of Croesus is mistaken. An Attis cult began around 1250 BCE in Dindymon and he was originally a local semi-deity of Phrygia, associated with the great Phrygian trading city of Pessinos, which lay under the lee of Mount Agdistis. The mountain was personified as a daemon, whom foreigners associated with the Great Mother Cybele, in the late 4th century BC, a cult of Attis became a feature of the Greek world. But the Olympian gods, fearing Agdistis, cut off the male organ, there grew up from it an almond-tree, and when its fruit was ripe, Nana, who was a daughter of the river-god Sangarius, picked an almond and laid it in her bosom. The almond disappeared, and she became pregnant, the infant was tended by a he-goat. As Attis grew, his beauty was godlike, and Agdistis as Cybele then fell in love with him. But the foster parents of Attis sent him to Pessinos, where he was to wed the kings daughter, according to some versions the King of Pessinos was Midas. Just as the marriage-song was being sung, Agdistis/Cybele appeared in her transcendent power, Attis father-in-law-to-be, the king who was giving his daughter in marriage, followed suit, prefiguring the self-castrating corybantes who devoted themselves to Cybele. But Agdistis repented and saw to it that the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay, at the temple of Cybele in Pessinus, the mother of the gods was still called Agdistis, the geographer Strabo recounted. As neighboring Lydia came to control Phrygia, the cult of Attis was given a Lydian context too, Attis is said to have introduced to Lydia the cult of the Mother Goddess Cybele, incurring the jealousy of Zeus, who sent a boar to destroy the Lydian crops. Then certain Lydians, with Attis himself, were killed by the boar, pausanias adds, to corroborate this story, that the Gauls who inhabited Pessinos abstained from pork. This myth element may have been invented solely to explain the unusual dietary laws of the Lydian Gauls, in Rome, the eunuch followers of Cybele were known as Galli. Julian the Apostate gives an account of the spread of the cult of Cybele in his Oratio 5. It spread from Anatolia to Greece and eventually to Rome in Republican times, the first literary reference to Attis is the subject of one of the most famous poems by Catullus but it appears that Attis was not worshipped at Rome until the early Empire. Oscar Wilde mentions Attis self-mutilation in his poem The Sphinx, And Atys with his knife were better than the thing I am. The most important representation of Attis is the life size statue discovered at Ostia, the statue is of a reclining Attis, after the emasculation

19.
Sibylline Books
–
Only fragments have survived, the rest being lost or deliberately destroyed. The Sibylline Books should not be confused with the so-called Sibylline Oracles, from Gergis the collection passed to Erythrae, where it became famous as the oracles of the Erythraean Sibyl. It would appear to have been this very collection that found its way to Cumae, the story of the acquisition of the Sibylline Books by Tarquinius is one of the famous legendary elements of Roman history. Tarquinius then relented and purchased the last three at the original price and had them preserved in a vault beneath the Capitoline temple of Jupiter. The story is alluded to in Varros lost books quoted in Lactantius Institutiones Divinae and they were usually ex-consuls or ex-praetors. They held office for life, and were exempt from all public duties. They had the responsibility of keeping the books in safety and secrecy, since they were written in hexameter verse and in Greek, the college of curators was always assisted by two Greek interpreters. The books were kept in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and, the Roman Senate sent envoys in 76 BC to replace them with a collection of similar oracular sayings, in particular collected from Ilium, Erythrae, Samos, Sicily, and Africa. This new Sibylline collection was deposited in the temple, together with similar sayings of native origin. According to the poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, the general Flavius Stilicho burned them, some genuine Sibylline verses are preserved in the Book of Marvels or Memorabilia of Phlegon of Tralles. These represent an oracle, or a combination of two oracles, of seventy hexameters in all and they report the birth of an androgyne, and prescribe a long list of rituals and offerings to the gods. Copies of the actual Sibylline Books were still in the Roman Temple at this time, the Oracles are nevertheless thought by modern scholars to be anonymous compilations that assumed their final form in the fifth century, after the Sibylline Books perished. They are a collection of Jewish and Christian portents of future disasters. An incomplete list of consultations of the Sibylline Books recorded by historians,399 BC, The books were consulted following a pestilence,348 BC, A plague struck Rome after a brief skirmish with the Gauls and Greeks. 345 BC, The books were consulted when a shower of stones rained down, Publius Valerius Publicola was appointed dictator to arrange a public holiday for religious observances. 295 BC, They were consulted following a pestilence. A Temple was built to Venus near the Circus Maximus, 240/238 BC, The Ludi Florales, or Flower Games, were instituted after consulting the books. 216 BC, When Hannibal annihilated the Roman Legions at Cannae, the books were consulted, 205-204 BC, During the Second Punic War, upon consultation of the Sibylline Books, an image of Cybele was transferred from Pessinos to Rome

20.
Second Punic War
–
The Second Punic War, also referred to as The Hannibalic War and the War Against Hannibal, lasted from 218 to 201 BC and involved combatants in the western and eastern Mediterranean. This was the major war between Carthage and the Roman Republic and its allied Italic socii, with the crucial participation of Numidian-Berber armies and tribes on both sides. The two states three major wars with each other over the course of their existence. They are called the Punic Wars because Romes name for Carthaginians was Poeni, derived from Poenici, in the following year, Hannibals army defeated the Romans again, this time in southern Italy at Cannae. In consequence of these defeats, many Roman allies went over to Carthage, against Hannibals skill on the battlefield, the Romans deployed the Fabian strategy. A sideshow of this war was the indecisive First Macedonian War in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Second Punic War was fought between Carthage and Rome and was ignited by the dispute over the hegemony of Saguntum, a Hellenized Iberian coastal city with diplomatic contacts with Rome. After great tension within the city government, culminating in the assassination of the supporters of Carthage, the city called for Roman aid, but the pleas fell on deaf ears. Following a prolonged siege and a struggle, in which Hannibal himself was wounded and the army practically destroyed. Many of the Saguntians chose to commit suicide rather than face subjugation by the Carthaginians, before the war, Rome and Hasdrubal the Fair had made a treaty. Livy reports that it was agreed that the Iber should be the boundary between the two empires and that the liberty of the Saguntines should be preserved, Hannibal departed with this army from New Carthage northwards along the coast in late spring of 218 BC. At the Ebro, he split the army into three columns and subdued the tribes there to the Pyrenees within weeks, but with severe losses. At the Pyrenees, he left a detachment of 11,000 Iberian troops, Hannibal reportedly entered Gaul with 50,000 infantry and 9,000 cavalry. He took his army by a route, avoiding the Roman allies along the coast. In the meantime, a Roman fleet with a force was underway to northern Iberia. A scouting party of 300 cavalry was sent to discover the whereabouts of the enemy and these eventually defeated a Carthaginian scouting troop of 500 mounted Numidians and chased them back to their main camp. Thus, with knowledge of the location of the enemy, the Romans marched upstream, Hannibal evaded this force and by an unknown route reached the Isère or the Durance at the foot of the Alps in autumn. He also received messengers from his Gallic allies in Italy that urged him to come to their aid, before setting out to cross the Alps, he was re-supplied by a native tribe, some of whose hereditary disputes he had helped solve. Their other commander, Publius Cornelius Scipio, returned to Rome, realizing the danger of an invasion of Italy where the tribes of the Boii, after 217 BC, he moved to Iberia

21.
Roman mythology
–
Roman mythology is the body of traditional stories pertaining to ancient Romes legendary origins and religious system, as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans. Roman mythology may also refer to the study of these representations. The Romans usually treated their traditional narratives as historical, even when these have miraculous or supernatural elements, the stories are often concerned with politics and morality, and how an individuals personal integrity relates to his or her responsibility to the community or Roman state. When the stories illuminate Roman religious practices, they are concerned with ritual, augury. Romes early myths and legends also have a relationship with Etruscan religion. In particular, the versions of Greek myths in Ovids Metamorphoses, written during the reign of Augustus, because ritual played the central role in Roman religion that myth did for the Greeks, it is sometimes doubted that the Romans had much of a native mythology. This perception is a product of Romanticism and the scholarship of the 19th century. From the Renaissance to the 18th century, however, Roman myths were an inspiration particularly for European painting, the Roman tradition is rich in historical myths, or legends, concerning the foundation and rise of the city. These narratives focus on human actors, with only occasional intervention from deities, in Romes earliest period, history and myth have a mutual and complementary relationship. As T. P. Wiseman notes, The Roman stories still matter, as they mattered to Dante in 1300 and Shakespeare in 1600, what does it take to be a free citizen. Can a superpower still be a republic, how does well-meaning authority turn into murderous tyranny. Major sources for Roman myth include the Aeneid of Vergil and the first few books of Livys history as well as Dionysius s Roman Antiquities. Other important sources are the Fasti of Ovid, a six-book poem structured by the Roman religious calendar, scenes from Roman myth also appear in Roman wall painting, coins, and sculpture, particularly reliefs. The Aeneid and Livys early history are the best extant sources for Romes founding myths, material from Greek heroic legend was grafted onto this native stock at an early date. By extension, the Trojans were adopted as the ancestors of the Roman people. Rape of the Sabine women, explaining the importance of the Sabines in the formation of Roman culture, numa Pompilius, the Sabine second king of Rome who consorted with the nymph Egeria and established many of Romes legal and religious institutions. Servius Tullius, the king of Rome, whose mysterious origins were freely mythologized. The Tarpeian Rock, and why it was used for the execution of traitors, lucretia, whose self-sacrifice prompted the overthrow of the early Roman monarchy and led to the establishment of the Republic

22.
Troy
–
The present-day location is known as Hisarlik. It was the setting of the Trojan War described in the Greek Epic Cycle, in particular in the Iliad, a new capital called Ilium was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople and declined gradually in the Byzantine era and these excavations revealed several cities built in succession. Troy VII has been identified with the city that the Hittites called Wilusa, the origin of the Greek Ἴλιον. Today, the hill at Hisarlık has given its name to a village near the ruins. It lies within the province of Çanakkale, some 30 km south-west of the provincial capital, the map here shows the adapted Scamander estuary with Ilium a little way inland across the Homeric plain. Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998, Ancient Greek historians variously placed the Trojan War in the 12th, 13th, or 14th centuries BC, Eratosthenes to 1184 BC, Herodotus to 1250 BC, Duris of Samos to 1334 BC. Modern archaeologists associate Homeric Troy with archaeological Troy VII, in the Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the River Scamander, where they had beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, recent geological findings have permitted the identification of the ancient Trojan coastline, and the results largely confirm the accuracy of the Homeric geography of Troy. In November 2001, the geologist John C, kraft from the University of Delaware and the classicist John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin, presented the results of investigations, begun in 1977, into the geology of the region. Besides the Iliad, there are references to Troy in the major work attributed to Homer. The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid, the Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War and the identity of Homeric Troy with the site in Anatolia. Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and there made sacrifices at tombs associated with the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus. After the 1995 find of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy VII, with the rise of critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were, for a long time, consigned to the realms of legend. However, the location of ancient Troy had from classical times remained the subject of interest. The Troad peninsula was anticipated to be the location, leChavaliers location, published in his Voyage de la Troade, was the most commonly accepted theory for almost a century. In 1822, the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren was the first to identify with confidence the position of the city as it is now known, the hill, near the city of Çanakkale, was known as Hisarlık. In 1868, Heinrich Schliemann visited Calvert and secured permission to excavate Hisarlık, in 1871–73 and 1878–79, he excavated the hill and discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period

23.
Aeneas
–
In Greco-Roman mythology, Aeneas was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Venus. His father was a first cousin of King Priam of Troy and he is a character in Greek mythology and is mentioned in Homers Iliad. Aeneas receives full treatment in Roman mythology, most extensively in Virgils Aeneid and he became the first true hero of Rome. Snorri Sturluson identifies him with the Norse Æsir Vidarr, Aeneas is the Latin spelling of Greek Αἰνείας. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aeneas is first introduced with Aphrodite naming him Αἰνείας for the αὶνóν ἄχος he caused her and it is a popular etymology for the name, apparently exploited by Homer in the Iliad. Later in the Medieval period there were writers who held that, as such, in the natural order, the meaning of Aeneas name combines Greek ennos and demas, which becomes ennaios, meaning in-dweller. However, there is no certainty regarding the origin of his name, in imitation of the Iliad, Virgil borrows epithets of Homer, including, Anchisiades, magnanimum, magnus, heros, and bonus. Though he borrows many, Virgil gives Aeneas two epithets of his own in the Aeneid, pater and pius. The epithets applied by Virgil are an example of a different from that of Homer, for whilst Odysseus is poikilios, Aeneas is described as pius. Likewise, Aeneas is called pater when acting in the interest of his men, the story of the birth of Aeneas is told in the Hymn to Aphrodite, one of the major Homeric Hymns. Aphrodite has caused the other gods Zeus, to fall in love with mortal women, in retaliation, Zeus puts desire in her heart for Anchises, who is tending his cattle among the hills near Mount Ida. When Aphrodite sees him she is smitten and she adorns herself as if for a wedding among the gods and appears before him. He is overcome by her beauty, believing that she is a goddess, after they make love, Aphrodite reveals her true identity to him and Anchises fears what might happen to him as a result of their liaison. Aphrodite assures him that he will be protected, and tells him that she bear him a son to be called Aeneas. However, she warns him that he must never tell anyone that he has lain with a goddess, when Aeneas is born, Aphrodite takes him to the nymphs of Mount Ida. She directs them to raise the child to age five, then take him to Anchises, according to other sources, Anchises later brags about his encounter with Aphrodite, and as a result is struck in the foot with a thunderbolt by Zeus. Thereafter he is lame in that foot, so that Aeneas has to carry him from the flames of Troy. Aeneas is a character in the Iliad, where he is twice saved from death by the gods as if for an as-yet-unknown destiny

24.
Hegemony
–
Hegemony is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others. In ancient Greece, hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states, the dominant state is known as the hegemon. In the 19th century, hegemony came to denote the Social or cultural predominance or ascendancy, later, it could be used to mean a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society. In contrast to authoritarian rule, cultural hegemony is hegemonic only if those affected by it also consent to and struggle over its common sense. From the post-classical Latin word hegemonia, from 1513 or earlier, or the Greek word ἡγεμονία, meaning authority, rule, political supremacy, likewise, the role of Athens within the short-lived Delian League was that of a hegemon. Ancient historians such as Xenophon and Ephorus were the first who used the term in its modern sense. In Ancient East Asia, Chinese hegemony existed during the Spring and Autumn period and they were appointed by feudal lord conferences, and thus were nominally obliged to uphold the imperium of the Zhou Dynasty over the subordinate states. 1st and 2nd century Europe was dominated by the peace of the Pax Romana. It was instituted by the emperor Augustus, and was accompanied by a series of military campaigns. From the 7th century to the 12th century, the Umayyad Caliphate and later Abbasid Caliphate dominated the vast territories they governed, with other states like the Byzantine Empire paying tribute. In 7th century India, Harsha, ruler of an empire in northern India from 606 to 647 AD. He preferred not to rule as a government, but left conquered kings on their thrones and contenting himself with tribute. From the late 9th to the early 11th century, the empire developed by Charlemagne achieved hegemony in Europe, with dominance over France, Italy and he lists several contenders for historical hegemony. Based on Portugals dominance in navigation, based on Dutch control of credit and money. Based on British textiles and command of the high seas, based on British industrial supremacy and railroads. To this list could be added the hegemony of Habsburg Spain in 16th century Europe, however, after an attempt by Phillip IV to restore it, by the middle of the 17th century Spains pretensions to hegemony had definitely and irremediably failed. This, in turn, made possible the Amsterdam stock market, in France, King Louis XIV and Napoleon I attempted French hegemony via economic, cultural and military domination of most of Continental Europe. However, Jeremy Black writes that, because of Britain, France was unable to enjoy the benefits of this hegemony, Britain also controlled the Indian subcontinent and large portions of Africa

25.
6th millennium BC
–
During the 6th millennium BC, agriculture spread from the Balkans to Italy and Eastern Europe, and also from Mesopotamia to Egypt. World population was stable at numbers ranging between approximately 5 and 7 million. A massive volcanic landslide off Mount Etna, Sicily, caused a megatsunami that devastated the eastern Mediterranean coastline on the continents of Asia, Africa, C.6000 BC, The entire 6th millennium was a part of the Holocene climatic optimum. This was a period also known as the Atlantic period and was characterized by minimal glaciation. C.6000 BC, The Chalcolithic comes to the Fertile Crescent, first use of copper in Middle East. C.6000 BC, Fully Neolithic agriculture has spread through Anatolia to the Balkans, C.6000 BC, Junglefowl kept in India. C.6000 BC, Female figurines holding serpents are fashioned on Crete and may have associated with water, regenerative power. C.6000 BC, Equidae disappear from the Americas, C.5900 BC, Vinča culture emerges on the shores of lower Danube. C.5800 BC, Beginning of the Dadiwan culture in China, C.5800 BC, The Hassuna culture in Mesopotamia, with the earliest version of stamp seals. C.5760 BC, The volcano Puy de Dôme in France erupts, C.5677 BC, Cataclysmic volcanic eruption of 12, 000-foot high Mount Mazama creates Oregons Crater Lake when the resulting caldera fills with water. It is the largest single Holocene eruption in history of the Cascade Range, C.5600 BC, Beginning of the desertification of North Africa, ultimately leading to the creation of the Sahara desert. This process may have spurred migration to the region of the Nile in the east, C.5600 BC, Favored date of the Black Sea deluge hypothesis. C.5600 BC, The Red Paint People become established in the region from present-day Labrador to the state of New York,5509 BC, The Byzantine calendar dates the Genesis creation narrative to 1 September of this year. C.5500 BC, Beginning of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the region of modern-day Romania, Moldova, C.5500 BC, Beginning of Tell Zeidan in Syria. C. 6th millennium BC, Beginning of Teppe Hasanlu in Iran, C. 6th millennium BC, Beginning of Zayandeh River Culture in Iran, including Sialk. C. late 6th and early 5th millennium BC, Beginning of Samara culture at the Samara bend region of the middle Volga, 5500–4800 BC, Samarra culture in Iraq. C.5500 BC, Beginning of the Xinle culture in China, C.5500 BC, Agriculture started in Ancient Egypt. C.5500 BC, Predynastic stage of Prehistoric Egypt, C.5450 BC, Volcano Hekla eruption

26.
Gordion Furniture and Wooden Artifacts
–
The best preserved of these works came from three royal burials, surviving nearly intact due to the relatively stable conditions that had prevailed inside the tomb chambers. The Gordion wooden objects are now recognized as the most important collection of finds recovered from the ancient Near East. The group comprises over 100 fine wooden artifacts, including tables, a bed, a throne, serving stands, stools, footstools, plates, spoons, boxes, a parasol, and 12 carved wooden animals. The furniture from the largest tomb at Gordion, Tumulus MM, is associated with King Midas, the good state of preservation of the Gordion wooden objects has allowed scientists to identify the woods used and investigate their deterioration. Several of the most elaborate pieces have been mounted for display in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, the central Anatolian site of Gordion was first excavated by Gustav and Alfred Körte in 1900 and then by Professor Rodney S. Young of the University of Pennsylvania in a campaign between 1950 and 1973. The wood discovered by the Körte brothers consisted mainly of fragments from a tumulus burial. Young’s excavations, however, produced a collection of wooden furniture and other types of objects. These came mainly from three early royal tumuli, along with carbonized remains from the level of the city mound. Three Great Early Tumuli detailed the excavation of the burials and their goods in preliminary interpretations. In 1981, Simpson went to Turkey to photograph and draw the objects, a project to study and conserve the Gordion wooden artifacts was then organized under her direction with the support of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Work has been carried out since that time by the Gordion Furniture Project team in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, kress Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, and other foundations and individual donors. During the past 30 years, most of the wood has been conserved, the collection is now considered to be the largest and most important group of well-preserved ancient wooden artifacts excavated from the Near East. Rodney Young named the largest burial mound at the site Tumulus MM—for “Midas Mound, ” after the famous Phrygian king Midas, who ruled at Gordion during the second half of the eighth century B. C. Young eventually came to believe that the occupant was not Midas but rather his father. When Midas took the throne on the death of his father, he surely would have officiated at the funeral, with the grave goods provided by him for the deposition. The historical King Midas was a contemporary of the Assyrian king Sargon II and was well known to the Greeks. ”Unfortunately. The first thing the excavators saw was the skeleton of the king lying on a mass of textiles, to the east of the “bed” were several furniture legs scattered among remnants of cloth

27.
Libation
–
A libation is a ritual pouring of a liquid as an offering to a god or spirit, or in memory of those who have passed on. It was common in many religions of antiquity and continues to be offered in various cultures today, various substances have been used for libations, most commonly wine or olive oil, and in India, ghee. The vessels used in the ritual, including the patera, often had a significant form which differentiated them from secular vessels, the libation could be poured onto something of religious significance, such as an altar, or into the earth. In East Asia, pouring an offering of rice into a stream, symbolises the unattachment from karma. Libation was part of ancient Egyptian society where it was an offering to honor and please the various divinities, sacred ancestors, humans present and not present. It is suggested that libation originated somewhere in the upper Nile Valley and spread out to other regions of Africa, isaiah uses libation as a metaphor when describing the end of the Suffering Servant figure who poured out his life unto death. Libation was a central and vital aspect of ancient Greek religion and it is one of the basic religious acts that define piety in ancient Greece, dating back to the Bronze Age and even prehistoric Greece. Libations were a part of life, and the pious might perform them every day in the morning and evening. A libation most often consisted of mixed wine and water, but could also be unmixed wine, honey, oil, water, the form of libation called spondē is typically the ritualized pouring of wine from a jug or bowl held in the hand. The most common ritual was to pour the liquid from an oinochoē into a phiale, after wine was poured from the phiale, the remainder of the contents was drunk by the celebrant. A libation is poured any time wine is to be drunk, the etiquette of the symposium required that when the first bowl of wine was served, a libation was made to Zeus and the Olympian gods. Heroes received a libation from the second krater served, and Zeus the Finisher from the third, an alternative was to offer a libation from the first bowl to the Agathos Daimon and from the third bowl to Hermes. An individual at the symposium could also make an invocation of, the Greeks stood when they prayed, either with their arms uplifted, or in the act of libation with the right arm extended to hold the phiale. In conducting animal sacrifice, wine is poured onto the victim as part of its ritual slaughter and preparation and this scene is commonly depicted in Greek art, which also often shows sacrificers or the gods themselves holding the phiale. The Greek verb spendō, pour a libation, also conclude a pact, derives from the Indo-European root *spend-, make an offering, perform a rite, the noun is spondē or spondai, libation. In the middle voice, the verb means enter into an agreement, blood sacrifice was performed to begin a war, spondai marked the conclusion of hostilities, and is often thus used in the sense of armistice, treaty. Libations poured onto the earth are meant for the dead and for the chthonic gods, in the Book of the Dead in the Odyssey, Odysseus digs an offering pit around which he pours in order honey, wine and water. For the form of libation called choē, a vessel is tipped over and emptied onto the ground for the chthonic gods

28.
Tutelary deity
–
A tutelary is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture or occupation. One type of deity is the genius, the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Another form of personal tutelary spirit is the spirit of European folklore. Socrates spoke of hearing the voice of his spirit or daimonion. This sign I have had ever since I was a child, the Greeks also thought deities guarded specific places, for instance, Athena was the patron goddess of the city of Athens. Tutelary deities who guard and preserve a place or a person are fundamental to ancient Roman religion, the tutelary deity of a man was his Genius, or that of a woman her Juno. In the Imperial era, the Genius of the Emperor was a focus of Imperial cult, an emperor might also adopt a major deity as his personal patron or tutelary, as Augustus did Apollo. Each town or city had one or more deities, whose protection was considered particularly vital in time of war. Rome itself was protected by a goddess whose name was to be kept secret on pain of death. The Capitoline Triad of Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva were also tutelaries of Rome, the Italic towns had their own tutelary deities. Juno often had this function, as at the Latin town of Lanuvium and the Etruscan city of Veii, the tutelary deity of Praeneste was Fortuna, whose oracle was renowned. The depiction of some such as the Magna Mater as tower-crowned represents their capacity to preserve the city. Tutelary deities were also attached to sites of a smaller scale, such as storerooms, crossroads. The poet Martial lists the tutelary deities who watch over various aspects of his farm, the Lares Compitales were the tutelary gods of a neighborhood, each of which had a compitum devoted to these. During the Republic, the cult of local or neighborhood tutelaries sometimes became rallying points for political and social unrest, chinese folk religion, both past and present, includes a myriad of tutelary deities. Exceptional individuals may become deified after death, guan Yu is a well-known tutelary. In Korean shamanism, jangseung and sotdae were placed at the edge of villages to frighten off demons and they were also worshiped as deities. In Shinto, the spirits, or kami, which life to human bodies come from nature

29.
Pausanias (geographer)
–
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the time of Roman emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece, a work that describes ancient Greece from his first-hand observations. This work provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology, andrew Stewart assesses him as, A careful, pedestrian writer. interested not only in the grandiose or the exquisite but in unusual sights and obscure ritual. He is occasionally careless, or makes unwarranted inferences, and his guides or even his own notes sometimes mislead him, yet his honesty is unquestionable, before visiting Greece, he had been to Antioch, Joppa and Jerusalem, and to the banks of the River Jordan. In Egypt, he had seen the pyramids, while at the temple of Ammon, in Macedonia, he appears to have seen the alleged tomb of Orpheus in Libethra. Crossing over to Italy, he had something of the cities of Campania. He was one of the first to write of seeing the ruins of Troy, Alexandria Troas, Pausanias Description of Greece is in ten books, each dedicated to some portion of Greece. He begins his tour in Attica, where the city of Athens, subsequent books describe Corinthia, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, Achaea, Arcadia, Boetia, Phocis and Ozolian Locris. He famously leaves out key portions of Greece such as Crete, the project is more than topographical, it is a cultural geography. Pausanias digresses from description of architectural and artistic objects to review the mythological and historical underpinnings of the society that produced them and his work bears the marks of his attempt to navigate that space and establish an identity for Roman Greece. He is not a naturalist by any means, though he does from time to comment on the physical realities of the Greek landscape. He notices the pine trees on the sandy coast of Elis, the deer and the boars in the oak woods of Phelloe. Pausanias is most at home in describing the art and architecture of Olympia. Yet, even in the most secluded regions of Greece, he is fascinated by all kinds of depictions of gods, holy relics, Pausanias has the instincts of an antiquary. Some magnificent and dominating structures, such as the Stoa of King Attalus in the Athenian Agora or the Exedra of Herodes Atticus at Olympia are not even mentioned. While he never doubts the existence of the gods and heroes, he criticizes the myths. His descriptions of monuments of art are plain and unadorned and they bear the impression of reality, and their accuracy is confirmed by the extant remains. He is perfectly frank in his confessions of ignorance, when he quotes a book at second hand he takes pains to say so

30.
Lydia
–
Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern western Turkish provinces of Uşak, Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian, at its greatest extent, the Kingdom of Lydia covered all of western Anatolia. Lydia was a satrapy of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, with Sardis as its capital, tabalus, appointed by Cyrus the Great, was the first satrap. Lydia was later the name of a Roman province, coins are said to have been invented in Lydia around the 7th century BC. The endonym Śfard survives in bilingual and trilingual stone-carved notices of the Achaemenid Empire and these in the Greek tradition are associated with Sardis, the capital city of King Gyges, constructed during the 7th century BC. The region of the Lydian kingdom was during the 15th-14th centuries part of the Arzawa kingdom, the Lydian language is not part of the Luwian subgroup. An Etruscan/Lydian association has long been a subject of conjecture, however, recent decipherment of Lydian and its classification as an Anatolian language mean that Etruscan and Lydian were not even part of the same language family. The boundaries of historical Lydia varied across the centuries and it was bounded first by Mysia, Caria, Phrygia and coastal Ionia. Later, the power of Alyattes II and Croesus expanded Lydia. Lydia never again shrank back into its original dimensions, the Lydian language was an Indo-European language in the Anatolian language family, related to Luwian and Hittite. It used many prefixes and grammatical particles, Lydian finally became extinct during the 1st century BC. Lydia developed after the decline of the Hittite Empire in the 12th century BC, in Hittite times, the name for the region had been Arzawa. According to Greek source, the name of the Lydian kingdom was Maionia, or Maeonia. Homer describes their capital not as Sardis but as Hyde, Hyde may have been the name of the district in which Sardis was located. Later, Herodotus adds that the Meiones were renamed Lydians after their king Lydus, son of Atys and this etiological eponym served to account for the Greek ethnic name Lydoi. During Biblical times, the Lydian warriors were famous archers, some Maeones still existed during historical times in the upland interior along the River Hermus, where a town named Maeonia existed, according to Pliny the Elder and Hierocles. In Greek myth, Lydia had also adopted the symbol, that also appears in the Mycenaean civilization. Omphale, daughter of the river Iardanos, was a ruler of Lydia, all three heroic ancestors indicate a Lydian dynasty claiming Heracles as their ancestor

31.
Mount Sipylus
–
Mount Spil, the ancient Mount Sipylus, is a mountain rich in legends and history in Manisa Province, Turkey, in what used to be the heartland of the Lydians and what is now Turkeys Aegean Region. Its summit towers over the city of Manisa as well as over the road between İzmir and Manisa. The Manisa relief, a full faced statue carved into a face is found near Mount Sipylus. It is traditionally identified as Cybele and dated to the late-Hittite or Luwian period in late second millennium BCE, the sculpture is known as Taş Suret in Turkish and sometimes referred to as such also in international literature. The mountain was considered a favorite haunt of the mother goddess, according to an old myth the sculpture was carved by Broteas, Tantalus ugly son. Presumably located on or very near the mountain, the ruins were reportedly still visible around in the beginning of the Common Era. The same Tantalus is famed through Greek mythology by the accounts relating that he had cut up his son Pelops and his son Pelops is said to have migrated later to the Peloponnese, named after him, and to have founded a kingdom. Tantalus daughter was the tragic Niobe, who is associated with the Weeping Rock, later in ancient times, Mount Sipylus, located in Lydia, rose above the site of Magnesia ad Sipylum, whose existence is traced back as far as the 5th century BCE. Magnesia was located along the Hermus River on the plain below and was the scene of the defeat of Antiochus III the Great by the Romans, the famous Weeping Rock is still widely visited. The mountain as a whole presents an area of forests and beautiful scenery. The mountain is also a spot for camping, parachuting, hiking. The highest point of the pass corresponds to a point very near the boundary between İzmir Province and Manisa Province, to bypass the steep and twisted Sabuncubeli Pass, the Sabuncubeli Tunnel is under construction. The 6,480 metres -long tunnel is expected to be opened end 2016, the Locust Plagues of Mount Sipylus

32.
Pessinus
–
However, archaeological research by Ghent University showed that the city developed around 400 BC at the earliest, which contradicts any historical claim of early Phrygian roots. As yet, the area is the only thoroughly investigated area of the city. Since 2009, the city is being investigated by a team of the University of Melbourne, Australia, led by Gocha Tsetskhladze. The village is situated on the high Anatolian plateau at ca.950 m altitude above sea level. It is developed in a valley, according to ancient tradition, Pessinous was the principal cult centre of the cult of Cybele/Kybele. The Graeco-Phrygian Cybele is rooted in the old Anatolian goddess Kubaba, tradition situates the cult of Cybele in the early Phrygian period and associates the erection of her first costly temple and even the founding of the city with king Midas. However, the Phrygian past of Pessinus is still obscure, both historically as archaeologically, for example, the geographer Strabo writes that the priests were potentates in ancient times, but it is unclear whether Pessinus was already a temple state ruled by dynastai in the Phrygian period. According to Cicero the Seleucid kings held deep devotion for the shrine, by the 3rd century BC at the latest, Pessinus had become a temple state ruled by a clerical oligarchy consisting of Galloi, eunuch priests of the Mother Goddess. The tribe of the Tolistobogi occupied the Phrygian territory between Gordium and Pessinus and it is doubtful that the temple state actually stood under Galatian control at this early stage. Roman involvement in Pessinus however has early roots, pergamum seems to have gained some control over Pessinus by the end of the third century BC. Pessinus was bequeathed a sanctuary by the Attalid kings, perhaps after 183 BC, the first century BC was a very unstable period for Pessinus with many rulers reigning over central Anatolia. According to Strabo the priests gradually lost their privileges, the Mithridatic Wars caused political and economic turmoil throughout the region. When Deiotaros, tetrarch of the Tolistobogi and loyal vassal of Rome, became king of Galatia in 67/66 BC or 63 BC, in 36 BC, rule over Galatia was transferred to king Amyntas by Marc Anthony. At the death of the monarch, under Emperor Augustus the empire of the Galatians was annexed by the Imperium Romanum as the province of Galatia, lollius in AD 31/32 and Q. Strabo called Pessinus an emporion, a centre, the largest west of the Halys river. It may be assumed that products from the Anatolian highlands were traded, especially grain, very soon after 25 BC the urbanization and transformation of the Pessinuntian temple state into a Greek polis began. Constructions such as a Corinthian temple and a street were erected with the marble from the quarries located at İstiklalbağı. The boundaries of Pessinus must have fixed, as were those of the newly founded colony of Germakoloneia. It has been argued that Pessinous and the other Galatian cities received a based on that of the cities in Pontus-Bithynia

33.
Agdistis
–
Agdistis was a deity of Greek, Roman and Anatolian mythology, possessing both male and female sexual organs, connected with the Phrygian worship of Attis and Cybele. Her androgyny was seen as symbolic of a wild and uncontrollable nature and it was this trait which was threatening to the gods and ultimately led to her destruction. According to Pausanias, on one occasion Zeus unwittingly begot by the Earth a superhuman being which was at man and woman. In other versions, there was a rock, called Agdo, Zeus impregnated the Great Mother, which brought forth Agdistis. The gods were afraid of the multi-gendered Agdistis, one deity put a sleeping draught in Agdistiss drinking well. After the potion had put Agdistis to sleep, Dionysus tied Agdistiss foot to his own male genitalia with a strong rope, when Agdistis awoke and stood, Agdistis ripped his penis off, castrating himself. The blood from his severed genitals fertilized the earth, and from that spot grew an almond tree. Once when Nana, daughter of the river-god Sangarius, was gathering the fruit of tree, she put some almonds into her bosom, but here the almonds disappeared. In some versions, Attis was born out of the almond. Attis was of extraordinary beauty that when he had grown up Agdistis fell in love with him. His relatives, however, destined him to become the husband of the daughter of the king of Pessinus, in some versions, the king betroths Attis to his daughter to punish Attis for his incestuous relationship with his mother. Agdistis now repented her deed, and obtained from Zeus the promise that the body of Attis should not become decomposed or disappear and this is the most popular account of an otherwise mysterious affair, which is probably part of a symbolical worship of the creative powers of nature. A hill of the name of Agdistis in Phrygia, at the foot of which Attis was believed to be buried, is mentioned by Pausanias. A story somewhat different is given by Arnobius, in which Attis is beloved by both Agdistis and Cybele, according to Hesychius and Strabo, Agdistis is the same as Cybele, who was worshiped at Pessinus under that name. In many ancient inscriptions, Agdistis is clearly distinct from Cybele, although primarily an Anatolian goddess, the cult of Agdistis covered a good deal of territory. By 250 BC it had spread to Egypt, and later to Attica, notably it could be found in Piraeus as early as the 3rd or 4th century BC, Rhamnus around 80 BC, inscriptions honoring her have been found at Mithymna and Paros. In the 1st century BC, her shrine in Philadelphia in Asia Minor required a code of behavior. At that location and others she is found with theoi soteres, inscriptions found at Sardis from the 4th century BC indicate that priests of Zeus were not permitted to take part in the mysteries of Agdistis

34.
Midas
–
Midas is the name of at least three members of the royal house of Phrygia. The most famous King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold and this came to be called the golden touch, or the Midas touch. The Phrygian city Midaeum was presumably named after this Midas, according to Aristotle, legend held that Midas died of starvation as a result of his vain prayer for the gold touch. However, Homer does not mention Midas or Gordias, while instead mentioning two other Phrygian kings, Mygdon and Otreus. Another King Midas ruled Phrygia in the late 8th century BC, up until the sacking of Gordium by the Cimmerians, when he is said to have committed suicide. Most historians believe this Midas is the person as the Mita, called king of the Mushki in Assyrian texts. Phrygia was by that time a Lydian subject, Herodotus says that Croesus regarded the Phrygian royal house as friends but does not mention whether the Phrygian royal house still ruled as kings of Phrygia. There are many, and often contradictory, legends about the most ancient King Midas. In one, Midas was king of Pessinus, a city of Phrygia, who as a child was adopted by King Gordias and Cybele, the goddess whose consort he was, and who was the goddess-mother of Midas himself. According to some accounts, Midas had a son, Lityerses, the reaper of men. According to other accounts he had a son Anchurus, arrian gives an alternative story of the descent and life of Midas. According to him, Midas was the son of Gordios, a peasant. While they were still deliberating, Midas arrived with his father and mother and they, comparing the oracular response with this occurrence, decided that this was the person whom the god told them the wagon would bring. They therefore appointed Midas king and he, putting an end to their discord, in addition to this the following saying was current concerning the wagon, that whosoever could loosen the cord of the yoke of this wagon, was destined to gain the rule of Asia. This someone was to be Alexander the Great, in other versions of the legend, it was Midas father Gordias who arrived humbly in the cart and made the Gordian Knot. However, some believe that this throne was donated by the later. One day, as Ovid relates in Metamorphoses XI, Dionysus found that his old schoolmaster and foster father, the old satyr had been drinking wine and wandered away drunk, to be found by some Phrygian peasants who carried him to their king, Midas. Midas recognized him and treated him hospitably, entertaining him for ten days and nights with politeness, while Silenus delighted Midas and his friends with stories, on the eleventh day, he brought Silenus back to Dionysus in Lydia

35.
Taurobolium
–
Originating in Asia Minor, its earliest attested performance in Italy occurred in 134 CE, at Puteoli, in honor of Venus Caelestis, documented by an inscription. The first dated reference to Magna Mater in an inscription dates from 160. The vires, or testicles of the bull, were removed from Rome, jeremy Rutter makes the suggestion that the bulls testicles substituted for the self-castration of devotees of Cybele, abhorrent to the Roman ethos. Public taurobolia, enlisting the benevolence of Magna Mater on behalf of the emperor, became common in Italy and Gaul, Hispania and Africa. The last public taurobolium for which there is an inscription was carried out for Diocletian and Maximian at Mactar in Numidia at the close of the 3rd century, recent scholarship has called into question the reliability of Prudentius description. It is an account by a Christian who was hostile to paganism. Earlier inscriptions that mention the rite suggest a less gory and elaborate sacrificial rite, therefore, Prudentius description may be based on a late evolution of the taurobolium. The taurobolium in the 2nd and 3rd centuries was usually performed as a measure for the welfare of the Emperor, Empire, or community, H. It was also performed as the fulfilment of a vow, or by command of the goddess herself, and the privilege was not limited by sex or class. In its 4th-century revival in high circles, Rutter has observed, We might even justifiably say that the taurobolium. It was a rite apparently forbidden by the Christian emperors and thus became a hallmark of the nobility in their final struggle against Christianity. The place of its performance at Rome was near the site of St Peters, in the excavations of several altars. A Criobolium, substituting a ram for the bull, was also practiced, in spite of the phrase renatus in aeternum, there is no reason to suppose that the ceremony was in any way borrowed from Christianity. The Taurobolium, Its Evolution and Terminology, esperandieu, Inscriptions de Lectoure, pp.94 if. Attis, Seine Mythen und Sein Kult, pp.168 if, the Great Mother of the Gods, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 43, Philology and Literature Series,1.3, zippel, Festschrift zum Doctorjubilaeum, Ludwig Friedländer,1895, p.489 f. This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh. Media related to Taurobolium at Wikimedia Commons Taurobolium – Nova Roma Initiation into the mysteries of Cybele, The Taurobolium

36.
Greece
–
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, historically also known as Hellas, is a country in southeastern Europe, with a population of approximately 11 million as of 2015. Athens is the capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki. Greece is strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the northeast. Greece consists of nine regions, Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace, Crete. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km in length, featuring a vast number of islands, eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at 2,918 metres. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as polis, which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming a part of the Roman Empire and its successor. The Greek Orthodox Church also shaped modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World, falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, the modern nation state of Greece emerged in 1830 following a war of independence. Greeces rich historical legacy is reflected by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, among the most in Europe, Greece is a democratic and developed country with an advanced high-income economy, a high quality of life, and a very high standard of living. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the member to join the European Communities and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001. Greeces unique cultural heritage, large industry, prominent shipping sector. It is the largest economy in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor, the names for the nation of Greece and the Greek people differ from the names used in other languages, locations and cultures. The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, all three stages of the stone age are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries and these civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Mycenaeans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC and this ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, in 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the worlds first democratic system of government in Athens

37.
Pindar
–
Pindar was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved and his poems can also, however, seem difficult and even peculiar. The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis once remarked that they are reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning. His poetry, while admired by critics, still challenges the casual reader, Pindar was the first Greek poet to reflect on the nature of poetry and on the poets role. A dream of a shadow Is our mortal being, but when there comes to men A gleam of splendour given of heaven, Then rests on them a light of glory And blessed are their days. His poetry illustrates the beliefs and values of Archaic Greece at the dawn of the classical period, five ancient sources contain all the recorded details of Pindars life. One of them is a short biography discovered in 1961 on an Egyptian papyrus dating from at least 200 AD and it has been claimed that biographical interpretations of the poems are due to a fatal conjunction of historicism and Romanticism. In other words, we know almost nothing about Pindars life based on traditional sources or his own poems. However, the pendulum of fashion has begun to change direction again. He was probably born in 522 BC or 518 BC in Cynoscephalae and his fathers name is variously given as Daiphantus, Pagondas or Scopelinus, and his mothers name was Cleodice. It is reported that he was stung on the mouth by a bee in his youth, Pindar was about twenty years old in 498 BC when he was commissioned by the ruling family in Thessaly to compose his first victory ode. He studied the art of poetry in Athens, where his tutor was Lasos of Hermione. The early-to-middle years of Pindars career coincided with the Persian invasions of Greece in the reigns of Darius and it is possible that Pindar spent much of this time at Aegina. Thrasybulus had driven the winning chariot and he and Pindar were to form a lasting friendship, Pindar seems to have used his odes to advance his, and his friends, personal interests. In 462 BC he composed two odes in honour of Arcesilas, king of Cyrene, pleading for the return from exile of a friend, Demophilus. In the latter ode Pindar proudly mentions his own ancestry, which he shared with the king, as an Aegeid or descendent of Aegeus, the historian Herodotus considered the clan important enough to deserve mention. Pindar might not actually claim to be an Aegeid since his I statements do not necessarily refer to himself. He was possibly the Theban proxenos or consul for Aegina and/or Molossia, as indicated in another of his odes, Nemean 7, in which he glorifies Neoptolemus, a national hero of Aegina and Molossia

38.
Potnia Theron
–
Potnia Theron is a term first used by Homer and often used to describe female divinities associated with animals. The word Potnia, meaning mistress or lady, was a Mycenaean Greek word inherited by Classical Greek, with the same meaning, homers mention of potnia theron is thought to refer to Artemis and Walter Burkert describes this mention as a well established formula. Many depictions use a version of the widespread ancient motif of the male Master of Animals. The oldest depiction has been discovered in Çatalhöyük, another example of Potnia theròn is situated in Museo civico archeologico di Monte Rinaldo in Italy, plate illustrates goddess that wears with a long dress and holds hands two panthers

39.
Persephone
–
In Greek mythology, Persephone, also called Kore or Cora, is the daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter, and is the queen of the underworld. Homer describes her as the formidable, venerable majestic princess of the underworld, Persephone was married to Hades, the god-king of the underworld. Similar myths appear in the Orient, in the cults of gods like Attis, Adonis and Osiris. Persephone is further said to have become by Zeus the mother of Dionysus, Iacchus, or Zagreus, the origins of her cult are uncertain, but it was based on very old agrarian cults of agricultural communities. Persephone was commonly worshipped along with Demeter and with the same mysteries, to her alone were dedicated the mysteries celebrated at Athens in the month of Anthesterion. In Classical Greek art, Persephone is invariably portrayed robed, often carrying a sheaf of grain and she may appear as a mystical divinity with a sceptre and a little box, but she was mostly represented in the process of being carried off by Hades. In Roman mythology, she is called Proserpina, and her mother, persephonē is her name in the Ionic Greek of epic literature. The Homeric form of her name is Persephoneia, in other dialects she was known under variant names, Persephassa, Persephatta, or simply Korē. Plato calls her Pherepapha in his Cratylus, because she is wise, There are also the forms Periphona and Phersephassa. The existence of so many different forms shows how difficult it was for the Greeks to pronounce the word in their own language, an alternative etymology is from φέρειν φόνον, pherein phonon, to bring death. John Chadwick speculatively relates the name of Persephone with the name of Perse, the Romans first heard of her from the Aeolian and Dorian cities of Magna Graecia, who used the dialectal variant Proserpinē. Hence, in Roman mythology she was called Proserpina, a name derived by the Romans from proserpere, to shoot forth. In a Classical period text ascribed to Empedocles, c, and Nestis, moistening mortal springs with tears. The epithets of Persephone reveal her double function as chthonic and vegetation goddess, the surnames given to her by the poets refer to her character as Queen of the lower world and the dead, or her symbolic meaning of the power that shoots forth and withdraws into the earth. Her common name as a goddess is Kore and in Arcadia she was worshipped under the title Despoina the mistress. Plutarch identifies her with spring and Cicero calls her the seed of the fruits of the fields, in the Eleusinian mysteries her return is the symbol of immortality and hence she was frequently represented on sarcophagi. The Orphic Persephone is further said to have become by Zeus the mother of Dionysus, Iacchus, Zagreus, as a goddess of the underworld, Persephone was given euphemistically friendly names. However it is possible some of them were the names of original goddesses

40.
Stoa of Attalos
–
The Stoa of Attalos was a stoa in the Agora of Athens, Greece. It was built by and named after King Attalos II of Pergamon, the current building was reconstructed from 1952–1956 by American architects. Typical of the Hellenistic age, the stoa was more elaborate, the stoas dimensions are 115 by 20 metres and it is made of Pentelic marble and limestone. The building skillfully makes use of different architectural orders, the Doric order was used for the exterior colonnade on the ground floor with Ionic for the interior colonnade. This combination had been used in stoas since the Classical period and was by Hellenistic times quite common, on the first floor of the building, the exterior colonnade was Ionic and the interior Pergamene. Each story had two aisles and twenty-one rooms lining the western wall, the rooms of both stories were lighted and vented through doorways and small windows located on the back wall. There were stairways leading up to the story at each end of the stoa. The building is similar in its design to the Stoa that Attalos brother. The main difference is that Attalos stoa had a row of rooms at the rear on the floor that have been interpreted as shops. The stoa is identified as a gift to the city of Athens for the education that Attalos received there, a dedicatory inscription on the architrave is engraved as built by Attalos II, ruler of Pergamon from 159 BC to 138 BC. The stoa was in frequent use until it was destroyed by the Heruli in 267, the ruins became part of a fortification wall, which made it easily seen in modern times. The Stoa of Attalos houses the Museum of the Ancient Agora and its exhibits are mostly connected with the Athenian democracy. Fotopedia. com, Selected photos of the Stoa of Attalus Ministry of Culture, The Museum The Museum Stoa of Attalos photos

Roman coin issued during the Second Punic war showing (obverse) the god of war Mars and (reverse) a very rare image of a Roman cavalryman of the time. Note the plumed helmet, long spear (hasta), small round shield, flowing mantle. Roman cavalry was levied from the equites, or noble knights, until c. 338 BC and thereafter also from the First Class of commoners under the centuriate organisation. Bronze quincunx from Larinum mint

Portrait of Emperor Julian on a bronze coin from Antioch minted in 360–363

19th century depiction of Julian being proclaimed Emperor in Paris at the Thermes de Cluny, standing on a shield in the Frankish manner, in February 360.

The Church of the Holy Apostles, where Julian brought Constantius II to be buried.

Illustration from The Fall of Princes by John Lydgate (which is a translation of De Casibus Virorum Illustribus by Giovanni Boccaccio) depicting "the skyn of Julyan". There is no evidence that Julian's corpse was skinned and displayed, and it is likely that the illustrator simply confused the fate of Julian's body with that of Emperor Valerian.